I live in a Tudor-style house that was built in 1930. So along with its arched pass-throughs and walnut picture moulding and glass doorknobs come plenty of little old-house headaches. For example, our fireplace doesn’t work. Oh it looks nice enough, waiting patiently in our living room for a few logs to call its own. But each time we light a fire, a gust of wind sneaks down our chimney blowing smoke back into our house.

After spending hundreds of dollars over the years trying to diagnose and fix the problem, we finally gave up, had our fireplace plumbed for gas, and bought a gas log. That’s right, a totally fake set of ceramic logs and “embers” one turns on with a little key and lights with a clicker. Whoosh! Instant fire!

And you know what? We love it. We spent a weekend evening in our living room for the first time in God-knows-how-long, eating cookies, playing games, and fumbling with my son’s Rubik’s Cube. It was positively Rockwellian.

But why? Many of the pleasures of a wood fire aren’t there: there’s no testosterone-fueled fire-building, or moments of delicious suspense while we wait for the kindling to catch, or the crackling and popping of damp wood, or gratuitous log-prodding with an iron poker. We’re certainly not going to roast marshmallows over the thing. Why is a fake fire better than none at all?

I’ve now spent a groggy hour or two staring into the evenly-flickering flames trying to figure out the appeal when it’s so clearly manufactured. All I can come up with is that we still have a primal attraction to warmth. There’s also something to the idea of “hearth and home” that still rings true, even though fireplaces are little more than symbolic nods to the past, when the day’s cooking happened over the fire, and central heating was nothing more than science fiction.

Not that it matters. The warmth and laughter we share during our fireside evenings is real, even if our fire isn’t.