“It was Christmas Eve.
I begin this way because it is the proper, orthodox, respectable way to begin… The experienced reader knows it was Christmas Eve, without my telling him. It always is Christmas Eve, in a ghost story.”
This is how Jerome K. Jerome introduced his short ghost story collection Told After Supper, released way back in good ol’ 1891. He goes on to describe Christmas eve as the a “great gala night” for ghosts, and state that, “There must be something ghostly in the air of Christmas—something about the close, muggy atmosphere that draws up the ghosts, like the dampness of the summer rains brings out the frogs and snails.”
This surely doesn’t fit with most (if any) common, modern views on Christmas, but it helps explain why singer Andy Williams, in the song “The Most Wonderful Time of the Year, croons that there’ll be scary ghost stories. Once upon a time, Christmas ghost stories were a tradition. It’s referenced in the aforementioned intro by Jerome, it’s mentioned by M.R. James in the brief foreword to his collection, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, and it’s the framing device for the story told in Henry James’ classic The Turn of the Screw, It’s one of relatively few Christmas traditions from Victorian society that the modern Western world didn’t adapt, borrow or just bring along into the present one way or another.
I have no Christmas ghost stories to share today. And even to a guy who writes the stuff that I write, it does seem like a slightly odd pastime. Then again, I get what Jerome means when he mentions the inherent… well, I won’t say eeriness, but maybe uncanniness of a Christmas night, for those of us who welcome and like to entertain such feelings. A lot of us grow up reading or watching A Christmas Carol, a story that boasts four ghosts as main characters and features a chilling vision of the protagonist’s death at its climax (often presented in a graveyard, under the watchful eye of the reaper-esque Spirit of Christmas Future). And I’ll be here all day talking about how spooky Santa Claus can be if you give him even an ounce of extra thought. (Of course, my views of Santa Claus are probably skewed by a story I heard from my mother when I was very young, about why one of her uncles was missing his thumb, and how Santa so strongly disliked thumb-sucking from children that he carried a sharp hatchet around in his sack that he’d use to express his disapproval…)
So part of me wishes that instead of just watching It’s a Wonderful Life and A Charlie Brown Christmas last night (seriously though, I’ll never outgrow the latter), that my folks and I could have spared a little time to read some Charles Dickens Christmas Ghost Stories, or better yet, come up with a few ghostly tales of our own. Maybe next year.
In the meantime, this gives me as fitting a moment as any to wish any readers a Merry Christmas. And if I don’t get around to it before then, here’s to a Happy New Year.
