The sections listed above depict the speaker’s spiritual evolution from loss of faith and despair to hope and a renewed faith by tracing the speaker’s experience of personal grief over the three Christmas holidays following the death of his friend.  In Section 28, recounting the first Christmas holiday, the speaker feels despair over the loss of Hallam, tinged with nostalgia for a happy past.  The speaker claims that when the bells of his village church woke him on this Christmas day he “woke with pain, / I almost wished no more to wake, / And that my hold on life would break/ Before I heard those bells again” (lines 13-16).  But while he feels despair, the sound of the Christmas bells bring back joyous memories from past Christmases.  The bells, therefore, bring order to his “troubled spirit” : “They bring me sorrow touched with joy, The merry, merry bells of Yule” (lines 19-20).
	Section 78 recounts the second Christmas following Hallam’s death.  The speaker notes that on this holiday his grief has a calmer expression.  Family and friends participate in the traditional Christmas games again, this time without a “single tear” or “mark of pain.”  The speaker is initially distressed by this apparent lack of feeling.  Wondering if sorrow can “wane” and “grief be changed to less,” the speaker regrets that “regret can die,” feeling as if he has betrayed his friend in letting his grief lessen (lines 13-16).  But in the final lines, the speaker realizes that his grief has not lessened, but has grown calmer with time: “Her [sorrow’s] deep relations are the same, / But with long use her tears are dry” (lines 19-20).
	Sections 104-106 recount the third Christmas following Hallam’s death.  At this holiday, the speaker experiences a renewal of hope expressed through his reaction to the Christmas bells.  The speaker’s family are celebrating Christmas this year in a new home.  And while the new location makes the speaker feel like a stranger and seems to violate the family’s old Christian traditions, the speaker seems ready to let go of old forms and traditions that no longer have meaning and make way for new life.  He addresses the Christmas bells in Section 106: “Ring out the old, ring in the new, / Ring, happy bells, across the snow:/ The year is going, let him go;/ Ring out the false, ring in the true./ Ring out the grief that saps the mind” (lines 5-9).  The speaker seems willing at last to let go of his grief and make way for a new understanding: “Ring in the valiant man and free,/ The larger heart, the kindlier hand;/ Ring out the darkness of the land,/ Ring in the Christ that is to be” (lines 29-32).  In these lines Tennyson transforms the troubling concept of evolution that caused such a crisis in Victorian faith into a form of spiritual evolution.  All things change, but out of change can come progress.  The speaker argues that our understanding of the Christian religion may change, but it can evolve into a new and better understanding, “the Christ that is to be.”