Tom Putnam lives in Cape Porpoise and has recently been leading worship services for the Sanford UU Church once or twice a month.

Our family singalongs are not the same without my dad’s presence, and our holiday traditions have changed over time. But in the privacy of our homes and the recesses of our minds, those familiar Yuletide carols continue to evoke his spirit.

It was my father who taught me how to harmonize.

Every weekend after church my siblings and I would drive the half-hour to my grandmother’s house to bring her to our home for the Sunday roast dinner our mother had prepared.

My dad had grown up singing “barbershop” with his family and, while driving, he would use Broadway tunes and folk songs to demonstrate how to hear a melody and blend your voice to it.

These days when I listen to the familiar strains of Christmas carols — it is his voice, and especially his preferred harmonies, that come back to me.

His baritone stood out in the all-male “schola” that sang at our church’s weekly high Mass; as we went caroling each winter; and at the annual community-wide “carol sing.”

We always lived in modest homes — first in Massachusetts and then, in 1972, when I was 9 and we moved to Maine, in Kennebunk.

So it was exciting and memorable as a child to be invited into one of the largest homes in our town, beautifully decorated for Christmas, and with a grand piano around which we gathered to sing.

It was not the type of home my family would usually frequent, but there was no question in my mind that we belonged, given my father’s booming voice at the center of the music and holiday cheer.

Those memories resurfaced recently when re-reading a classic Christmas story by John Updike, which opens: “Surely one of the natural wonders of Tarbox was Mr. Burley at the town hall carol sing. How he would jubilate, how he would God-rest those merry gentlemen, how he would boom when the male voices became Good King Wenceslas.”

Updike describes the annual event as “a chance in the darkest months to put on some gaudy clothes and get out of the house. These old holidays weren’t scattered around the calendar by chance. Harvest and seedtime, seedtime and harvest, the elbows of the year.”

Yet soon readers discover that Mr. Burley is missing this season, leaving a large hole. And it seems his obituary was deceiving. “It wasn’t a long illness,” Updike writes, “it was cyanide, the Friday after Thanksgiving.”

We lost my father over a decade ago. His passing at age 85 of natural causes was more peaceful than poor Mr. Burley’s. But though less jarring, his absence also leaves a void.

I feel it at the crescendo of “O Holy Night” when the chorus sings “bow on your knees” — remembering how my dad would bend his in reaching for the bass notes.

Or in the “fa la la la’s” which served as the riff my dad would sing as we traveled between houses on Partridge Lane and in the town center when out caroling.

Such melodies are, for me, a nostalgic reminder of times past, the fading of a childish innocence, the reverence for a father’s love.

Like connective tissue — they tied my father to his own childhood and connected him, in turn, to his children’s lives.

During a darkening time of year, then and now, they elicit warmth, hope, and light.

“Why?” Mr. Burley’s neighbors wondered, did he choose to end his life given that he had “health, money, hobbies, that voice!”

“Well, why anything?” Updike counters.  “Why do we? Come every year sure as the solstice to carol these antiquities?”

And the story concludes by answering its own question: “Better, I suppose, to sing than to listen.”

Our family singalongs are not the same without my dad’s presence, and our holiday traditions have changed over time. But in the privacy of our homes and the recesses of our minds, those familiar Yuletide carols continue to evoke his spirit.

And so when hearing those ancient melodies and the harmonies our father taught us, and in the face of the dark tidings of our own lives — we sing.