Nostalgia Interviews With Chris Deacy

This week’s episode is a Christmas special as I am joined by someone else who has made Christmas their research project in recent years. Lucinda Murphy and I had never met before we recorded this interview in London in October 2023, and there are many parallels and synergies which make this a really compelling discussion around the ‘meaning’ of Christmas. Lucinda began her doctorate at Durham on Christmas in 2016 at just the time that my own Christmas as Religion was published. Lucinda talks about how the impetus for her work was that so little has been written on contemporary views of Christmas and she discusses why people don’t always think it is a subject worthy of study. Lucinda reflects on whether the study of Christmas was going to ruin Christmas for her personally and how it feels to live for so long in such a liminal period of time. She discusses also how Covid impacted on her research vis-à-vis the tropes of celebration and crisis and she talks about the notion of emotional dissonance. Lucinda use