For many people, the Christmas season is one of melancholy rather than the expected joy. There are people who feel left out when capitalism and “Christianity” reign supreme. Some people suffer from feeling unable to meet the expectations of family and friends. Many, myself included, can become melancholy when the emotions and sensations of today’s holiday fail to match those of the past.

In recent weeks, Christmas decorations in my building, the smell of cinnamon, and notes of carols have evoked a gilded collage of the weeks between Thanksgiving and New Year’s during the 1960s and 1970s in my small midwestern city: glittering shop windows in Chicago’s Loop; the anticipation of Christmas day, which was sharpened by opening an Advent calendar’s windows; the smell of pine, eggnog, and cookies without parental oversight; singing in church; party clothes. . . .

All took place in a world that seemed so secure then. Adults seemed to have it under control. Life followed a pattern, and the world was a smooth pond. My family was safe on its high rung of the local social hierarchy. Supporting it all was my parents’ gratitude that the Christmases of the 1930s Depression and 1940s war were behind them. The world ahead looked good.

During my childhood, bits of shrapnel occasionally pierced my comfortable Christmas. I was vaguely aware of 1960s upheavals when tie-dye and children with weird names and mixed race — “Rainbow” and “Moab” — stood out among the usual tartan and velvet dresses. I was loosely aware adults were not always in control. A family friends’ marriage broke up; someone went to prison for tax evasion.

Wanting to travel back and recapture what we miss today is a temptation. But, for me, the temptation is not to recapture what I miss now, but what I missed then. I want to examine that shrapnel. I would like to go back to my church and see it with adult eyes. Instead of running around among the legs of my parents’ guests at our annual Christmas open house, I would like to look guests in the eye and hear their stories.

I’d find out about the unwed mother of the baby in tie-dye named Rainbow. How did an upper-class daughter of a judge end up in a commune? What lay ahead for that baby?

I want to know what provoked the outburst of our pediatrician’s wife at our party. Is it connected with their son, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and her own hospitalization?

What is behind the angry conversation of that rabid conservative and Commie hater friend of my parents? Is his holiday haunted by the Christmas of 1944, when he received a Purple Heart for the hell of the Battle of the Bulge?

And what about our gentle choir director, leading distracted fourth-graders in Christmas carols and married to a shrew. How does he stay so even-tempered? What was his 1944 like as a Navy musician? Was he carrying stretchers or trying to raise morale with music in Pacific jungles?

I know now that the local psychiatrist (the one treating the pediatrician’s wife) was having an affair with a neighbor. Does anyone else at our party know?

Is Miss L., the speech pathologist, really a Communist? My father says she is a “parlor pink.”

What about Mr. W., who just sold land he owns to a local educational institution, although he is a trustee.? They say he will make a bundle of money from it.

Mr. S. is drinking a lot. His company is fighting competition from Japan and will eventually close, like all the other industries in our town. That childhood world was less secure than I thought.

I don’t only want to understand. I also want to do better. I want to take back all the stupid things I said or thought as a child, like how annoying I found the boy with schizophrenia. I want to tell the veterans that I have read about their war and maybe I can appreciate a tiny bit. I would like to be with my father again when he explains that he cries when he hears the song “Toyland,” because it came out the year his father left. I would tell him his story helped me with my children when I divorced.

They say, “you can’t go home again” and the “past is another country,” and I know it’s true.

But still I’d like to go there, if only to remind myself that it was more like today than I thought.