There’s a moment in the soprano descant (the David Willcocks arrangement) of the final verse of Hark! The Herald Angels Sing where the melody twists and moves like a rollercoaster. It’s in the middle of the word “angels”, when two syllables are elongated into four notes. One little minor note at an apex of a melody and whoosh! Down it goes, rattling down a slope before it is hoiked up again for the word “Glory”. Giddy descent, rapid rise, all for one massive, juddering crescendo on the final, resplendent “King”.

I could sing it once. Then I went to university, went clubbing four nights a week and became an alto by the end of freshers’ term.

I never did learn the alto parts; those subtle little supportive props, the cool girls of four-part harmony. But the soprano parts of Christmas carols remain etched into my brain. Once in Royal David’s City will forever be associated with that anxiety-churning first verse, an acapella solo out the front of the choir stalls; I was 12 when I had the uneasy honour of it. Snatches of the call-backs in O, Come All Ye Faithful are usually thrown, messily, between my sister and I on Christmas Day (“O, Come!”). Our adolescent giggles over the mild vibrato on “breastful of milk” in the tenor’s solo of In The Bleak Midwinter (the beautiful, undeniably forlorn Harold Darke arrangement) remain in place now, long after we should know better, long after we have fed our own children.

I don’t believe in God, that vanished long ago, but I do love carols. I love the archaic language of the lyrics, words such as “seraphim”, “excelsis” and “verily” that you just don’t hear anywhere else. I love the extremes of feeling they conjure, not necessarily in the shades of religious fervour but something purer, of wonder and stillness and raw celebration. I couldn’t tell you what literally unfolds in the lyrics of that final verse of Hark!, but I also can’t sing it (a good pitch lower than it is written) without being at the end of a choir stall, in a robe, knowing that we’d reached the end of Nine Lessons and Carols and that Christmas itself was but days away. Festive anticipation in a bottle.

I know the carols because I was in a church choir from the age of eight, until my parents moved away from the village 15 years later. To return home - after university, after living in New York or London - for Christmas was to go push through the too-short curtains of the choir stalls, leaving whatever new life you’d developed on the familiar tiles underfoot to pull on the dusty robe you’d left behind and sing.

I can’t remember when I last attended a carol service. There have been Christingles and Christmas mornings, but a decade, at least, must have passed since I worked my way through nine lessons and sang the accordant carols. At some point in December I will trace the ghosts, stick some Rutter on Spotify, be that person who tries to put Gaudete on a playlist after too much mulled wine, watch YouTube videos of big glossy choirs and fancy orchestras and feel my whole body shiver into goosebumps. London has dozens but you have to book tickets. I can no longer sing the descants. I don’t know who would come with me. What happens to traditions when they lose the casing in which they were made?

A few weekends back I remembered being new in the city and seeing the church in Camberwell advertise their carol service from the bus. I’ve not really left the area, thought about going ever since. I put the date in the calendar M and I share, the one that guarantees childcare if we write it down. This year, I will go, and I will stand in a pew, and I will sing.