The Christmas season is upon us, and more than likely, while you’ve been out shopping or listening to the radio, you heard some rendition of the 1963 Andy Williams song, “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.” And if you’re like me, you’ve probably found the song’s mention of ghost stories to be a bit perplexing. Williams sings: “There’ll be scary ghost stories and tales of the glories of Christmases long, long ago”—a concept that seems far more fit for Halloween. The truth is, Christmas ghost stories were as much a part of the holiday tradition as carols and wreaths up until the early 1900s, carrying forward a legacy that dates back to the Winter Solstice.
To understand the concept of telling ghost stories at Christmas time, you first have to understand the origins of Christmas. While Christmas is widely recognized as being a Christian-based holiday, celebrating the birth of Jesus, it was born of the pagan Winter Solstice celebrations and Yule festivals that pre-dated both Jesus and Christianity. It is widely believed that the Christian church, in an effort to ease the transition for converts, deliberately set the religious observance around the same time as the traditional Winter Solstice and Yule festivals, increasing the chances that Christmas and, ultimately, Christianity would be embraced.
One of the traditions that carried over from these pagan beliefs was telling ghost stories in winter. Winter nights are longer, darker, and lend themselves to spooky tales. Many pagan beliefs suggested that during the Winter Solstice, the dead could more easily cross into the living world, while others used tales of ethereal beings, gods, and monsters to explain the darkening of the days. This practice spanned centuries. The telling of ghost stories, often referred to as “winter’s tales,” was referenced as early as 1589. In Christopher Marlowe’s play “The Jew of Malta,” a character muses: “Now I remember those old women’s words, who in my wealth would tell me winter’s tales, and speak of spirits and ghosts by night.” Even Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale,” tells of the tradition when Mamillius proclaims, “A sad tale’s best for winter. I have one. Of sprites and goblins.”
But the Christmas ghost story didn’t really hit the mainstream until the Victorian era, when an author named Charles Dickens penned a story you may have heard of, titled “A Christmas Carol.” First published in 1843, the Dickens holiday classic kicked off an annual tradition of releasing ghost stories at Christmas. As the editor of Household Worlds and later All the Year Round, Dickens would go on to publish several other Christmas ghost stories, making him the godfather of the tradition, which would hold a stronghold on the Christmas holiday through the 19th century.
“Whenever five or six English-speaking people meet round a fire on Christmas Eve, they start telling each other ghost stories,” humorist Jerome K. Jerome wrote in his 1891 collection, Told After Supper. “Nothing satisfies us on Christmas Eve but to hear each other tell authentic anecdotes about spectres. It is a genial, festive season, and we love to muse upon graves, and dead bodies, and murders, and blood.”
Despite its stronghold throughout the 19th century, the tradition of Christmas ghost stories in America began to fade after the turn of the 20th century. While ghost stories could still be found in magazine Christmas annuals as late as 1915 (and were famously sung about by Andy Williams in 1963), the custom eventually gave way to other festive cheer.
While Americans turned their back on the tradition, Christmas ghost stories continue to be embraced in Europe. In fact, the tradition evolved with technology, and many of the popular Christmas ghost stories were adapted for radio and, ultimately, television.
In 1923, BBC Radio aired its first dramatic reading of Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” by Cyril Estcourt, featuring Carol interludes sung by a church choir. In the 1970s, the BBC aired a series of annual television plays under the title of “A Ghost Story for Christmas,” which adapted Christmas ghost stories from both Charles Dickens as well as M.R. James, a British author who wrote a series of short Christmas ghost stories to entertain family and friends and later published them in a four-volume series in the early 1900s. Today, the tradition continues on British television with new adaptations still being released and ghost stories finding their way into Christmas specials of shows like “Downton Abbey.”
So for those of us who like to inject a little spooky fun into our Christmas, we’re simply tapping into the traditions of our ancestors and the Christmases of old. Revisiting these old ghost stories, whether on the BBC or in print, might be especially beneficial in our current times. As William Dean Howell lamented in an 1886 Harper’s editorial about the decline of the Dickens ghost story and the morals they carried:
“It was well once a year, if not oftener, to remind men by parable of the old, simple truths; to teach them that forgiveness, and charity, and the endeavor for life better and purer than each has lived, are the principles upon which alone the world holds together and gets forward. It was well for the comfortable and the refined to be put in mind of the savagery and suffering all round them, and to be taught, as Dickens was always teaching, that certain feelings which grace human nature, as tenderness for the sick and helpless, self-sacrifice and generosity, self-respect and manliness and womanliness, are the common heritage of the race, the direct gift of Heaven, shared equally by the rich and poor.”
