The waning days of the year have been observed with riotous excess, bright bonfires, sad laments, and melancholy memories for millennia. It is a time when we fearfully confront our mortality and loneliness or hopefully pray for better days ahead.

The most moving songs of the season partake of this bittersweet mixture of emotions. In the middle of a world war several of the most heartfelt Christmas songs were written and listened to by armed men in European encampments, African deserts and Pacific jungles, and by their loved ones thousands of miles away.

“I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas” was introduced by Bing Crosby on his Christmas Day broadcast of 1941, two-and-a-half weeks after Pearl Harbor, and it’s yearning for holidays “just like the ones we used to know” can still bring a lump to the throat.

The dark year of 1943 brought another classic with its heart-stopping conclusion: “I’ll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams.” And in 1944, Judy Garland in a film about a family in the midst of being uprooted from their safe, familiar home, upped the ante with “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”

Who, in the fateful holiday season during which the Battle of the Bulge was taking place, could have missed the subtext of “through the years we all will be together, if the fates allow. Until then we’ll have to muddle through somehow?” The last was so close to the bone that it was often amended to the more anodyne “hang a shining star upon the highest bough.”

Of course, the great granddaddy of end of the year nostalgia set to music is “Auld Lang Syne,” that is — more or less — ‘days gone by’ or ‘long ago times.’ It was written by Robert Burns in 1788. He was a lowland Scot, a place from which most of his country’s emigrants to Ireland and America originated.

In 1700, the population of Scotland was about one million and by Burns’ time, almost a century later, it was about the same. It isn’t that the population didn’t grow but that the country couldn’t feed the extra mouths. So an estimated 250,000 left for the colonies in the years before the American Revolution stopped the torrent. Mothers and fathers said good-bye to sons and daughters, brother to brother, often forever.

That gives a particular flavor to lines like these: “We two have paddled in the brook/ From morning sun to dine,/ But seas between us broad have roared/ Since Auld Lang Syne.”

No wonder in a nation of immigrants this is the song we sing every New Year’s Eve. But, of course, if we live long enough we are all orphans, emigres from a land of the past, missing our dear departed. And in a country where it is the norm to pick up and move on, many of us are far away from the people and places that formed us and that we keep alive in our memories.

In a sentiment suitable for this season, the aged Mark Twain, or perhaps more correctly Sam Clemens, said that on a trip to India he realized that “all that goes to make the me in me was in a Missouri village, on the other side of the globe.” Not to mention the fact that it was by then a village 60 years in his past.

All the me in most of us is from somewhere far away in time, or space — or both. If there are any living links to it that remain, this is the time of year we are moved to renew them. And if not, we try to keep their memory evergreen.

“So here’s a hand my trusty friend!
And give me a hand of thine!
And we’ll take a pleasant goodwill drink,
For Auld Lang Syne.”