Christmas: a good time for ghost stories

While everything around us during the Christmas season might be glittering with fairy lights and baubles and shiny tinsel of every hue, this is also a wonderful time to enjoy a good, spine-tingling ghost story.

What would Christmas be without Dickens' 'Christmas Carol', it's larger than life (or afterlife) characters and its heart warming conclusion? And yet, not only was Dickens just one of many ghost story writers of his time, but the Christmas ghost story tradition goes back far before the Victorian era; it just so happens that the Victorians really got Christmas commercialism going at the same time as the media took hold and better education meant many more people were able to enjoy stories in books and magazines.

So as a blog that celebrates the traditions of Halloweens and its many ghosts, I thought I'd raise my hat to the ghosts of Christmas, of midwinter - an even darker and harsher time of the year than Halloween.

The Christmas Ghost Story Tradition

Like Halloween, Christmas in the European traditions was linked to ancient pagan festivals; the celebration of the midwinter solstice by the Celts, the Norse feast of Yule and the Roman festival of Saturnalia are all associated with Christmas traditions. For these people of ancient times, midwinter was a special time, one of those markers of the year where the darkest, longest night eventually dawned into the start of longer days, when light and warmth began to return to the world. It was a dark and dangerous time, harsh and hungry, when people did not know for certain whether they would survive into the spring. Death was closer, it seemed, during those dark days of midwinter, and with it, the ghosts of those already dead.

The longest night of the year meant that the veil that divided the world of the living from the world of the dead was lifted for a time, and ghosts would walk among us. Being stuck indoors by the hearth during cold,  harsh weather, where even the days were dark and dismal, provided fertile ground for feasts of the imagination and ghost stories, compelling as they always seem to be, were perfect for family or village gatherings.

Looking back a couple of hundred years  before Dickens, Shakespeare happily added ghosts and witches, sprites, fairies and goblins to his stories.  In 'The Winter's Tale' written in 1611, Mamillius says: "A sad tale's best for winter. I have one of sprites and goblins."

Those Victorians Again

But it was in the Victorian era that the Christmas ghost story really came to the fore with writers such as Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell, Sheridan le Fanu, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and many more as well as Dickens. In USA, Henry James gave us the  'Turn of the Screw', published in 1898, which starts: "The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as on Christmas Eve in an old house a strange tale should essentially be, I remember no comment uttered till somebody happened to note it as the only case he had met in which such a visitation had fallen on a child."

Modern Christmas Ghost Stories

And Christmas ghost stories have lingered. For example, 'It's a Wonderful Life' is loosely predicated on Dickens' ghosts reminding a man of the value of kindness and the impact his actions can have on others. A modern chilling tale set in the middle of a winter storm is Stephen King's classic 'The Shining'. One of my recent favourites was the haunting tale by Eowyn Ivey written in 2011, 'The Snow Child', a retelling of an ancient Russian myth set in a frozen Alaskan landscape in the early twentieth century. It is haunting and melancholic and works on human fears that include the fear of survival in a hostile environment and the harsh winter landscape, the fear of infertility and old age.

This midwinter, pause in your work, turn off the TV and the computer, sit by the light of a lamp late in the evening and treat yourself to one of the world's wonderful winter ghost stories. Some ideas below:

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey

The Turn of the Screw and Other Stories by Henry James

The Mistletoe Bride and Other Haunting Tales by Kate Mosse

The Woman in Black by Susan Hill