A Plea to Resurrect the Christmas Tradition of Telling Ghost Stories about:reader?url=https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/plea-resurrec...

smithsonianmag.com

A Plea to Resurrect the Christmas

Tradition of Telling Ghost Stories
Colin Dickey
8-11 minutos

For the last hundred years, Americans have kept ghosts in their
place, letting them out only in October, in the run-up to our only real
haunted holiday, Halloween. But it wasn’t always this way, and it’s
no coincidence that the most famous ghost story is a Christmas
story—or, put another way, that the most famous Christmas story is
a ghost story. Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol was first
published in 1843, and its story about a man tormented by a series
of ghosts the night before Christmas belonged to a once-rich, now
mostly forgotten tradition of telling ghost stories on Christmas Eve.
Dickens’ supernatural yuletide terror was no outlier, since for much
of the 19th century, was the holiday indisputably associated with
ghosts and the specters.

“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.”

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A Plea to Resurrect the Christmas Tradition of Telling Ghost Stories about:reader?url=https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/plea-resurrec...

Telling ghost stories during winter is a hallowed tradition, a folk

custom stretches back centuries, when families would wile away
the winter nights with tales of spooks and monsters. “A sad tale’s
best for winter,” Mamillius proclaims in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s
Tale: “I have one. Of sprites and goblins.” And the titular Jew of
Malta in Christopher Marlowe’s play at one point 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.”

Based in folklore and the supernatural, it was a tradition the

Puritans frowned on, so it never gained much traction in America.
Washington Irving helped resurrect a number of forgotten
Christmas traditions in the early 19th century, but it really was
Dickens who popularized the notion of telling ghost stories on
Christmas Eve. The Christmas issues of the magazines he edited,
Household Words and (after 1859) All the Year Round, regularly
included ghost stories—not just A Christmas Carol but also works
like The Chimes and The Haunted Man, both of which also feature
an unhappy man who changes his ways after visitation by a ghost.
Dickens’ publications, which were not just winter-themed but
explicitly linked to Christmas, helped forge a bond between the
holiday and ghost stories; Christmas Eve, he would claim in “The
Seven Poor Travellers” (1854), is the “witching time for Story-
telling.”

Dickens discontinued the Christmas publications in 1868,

complaining to his friend Charles Fechter that he felt “as if I had
murdered a Christmas number years ago (perhaps I did!) and its
ghost perpetually haunted me.” But by then the ghost of Christmas
ghost stories had taken on an afterlife of its own, and other writers
rushed to fill the void that Dickens had left. By the time of Jerome’s

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1891 Told After Supper, he could casually joke about a tradition

long ensconced in Victorian culture.

If some of these later ghost stories haven’t entered the Christmas

canon as Dickens’ work did, there’s perhaps a reason. As William
Dean Howells would lament in a Harper’s editorial in 1886, the
Christmas ghost tradition suffered from the gradual loss of Dickens’
sentimental morality: “the ethical intention which gave dignity to
Dickens’ Christmas stories of still earlier date has almost wholly
disappeared.”

While readers could suspend their disbelief for the supernatural,

believing that such terrors could turn a man like Scrooge good
overnight was a harder sell. “People always knew that character is
not changed by a dream in a series of tableaux; that a ghost cannot
do much towards reforming an inordinately selfish person; that a life
cannot be turned white, like a head of hair, in a single night, but the
most allegorical apparition; …. and gradually they ceased to make
believe that there was virtue in these devices and appliances.”

Dickens’ genius was to wed the gothic with the sentimental, using
stories of ghosts and goblins to reaffirm basic bourgeois values; as
the tradition evolved, however, other writers were less wedded to
this social vision, preferring the simply scary. In Henry James’s
famous gothic novella, The Turn of the Screw, the frame story
involves a group of men sitting around the fire telling ghost stories
on Christmas Eve—setting off a story of pure terror, without any
pretension to charity or sentimentality.

***********

At the same time that the tradition of Christmas ghosts had begun
to ossify, losing the initial spiritual charge that drove its popularity, a

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new tradition was being imported from across the Atlantic, carried
by the huge wave of Scottish and Irish immigrants coming to
America: Halloween.

The holiday as we now know it is an odd hybrid of Celtic and

Catholic traditions. It borrows heavily from the ancient pagan
holiday Samhain, which celebrates the end of the harvest season
and the onset of winter. As with numerous other pagan holidays,
Samhain was in time merged with the Catholic festival of All Souls’
Day, which could also be tinged towards obsessions with the dead,
into Halloween—a time when the dead were revered, the
boundaries between this life and the afterlife were thinnest, and
when ghosts and goblins ruled the night.

Carried by Scottish and Irish immigrants to America, Halloween did

not immediately displace Christmas as the preeminent holiday for
ghosts—partly because for several decades it was a holiday for
Scots. Scottish immigrants (and to a lesser extent Irish immigrants
as well) tried to dissociate Halloween from its ghostly implications,
trying unsuccessfully to make it about Scottish heritage, as
Nicholas Rogers notes in his Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to
Party Night: “There were efforts, in fact, to recast Halloween as a
day of decorous ethnic celebration.” Organizations such as the
Caledonian Society in Canada observed Halloween with Scottish
dances and music and the poetry of Robbie Burns, while in New
York the Gaelic Society commemorated Halloween with a
seannches: an evening of Irish poetry and music.

Americans' hunger for ghosts and nightmares, however,

outweighed their hunger for Irish and Scottish culture, and
Americans seized on Halloween’s supernatural, rather than cultural,
aspects—we all know now how this turned out.

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**********

The transition from Christmas to Halloween as the preeminent

holiday for ghosts was an uneven one. Even as late as 1915,
Christmas annuals of magazines were still dominated by ghost
stories, and Florence Kingsland’s 1904 Book of Indoor and Outdoor
Games still lists ghost stories as fine fare for a Christmas
celebration: “The realm of spirits was always thought to be nearer
to that of mortals on Christmas than at any other time,” she writes.

For decades, these two celebrations of the oncoming

winter bookended a time when ghosts were in the air, and we kept
the dead close to us. My own family has for years invited friends
over around the holidays to tell ghost stories. Instead of exchanging
gifts, we exchange stories—true or invented, it doesn’t matter.
People are inevitably sheepish at first, but once the stories start
flowing, it isn’t long before everyone has something to offer. It’s a
refreshing alternative to the oft-forced yuletide joy and
commercialization; resurrecting the dead tradition of ghost stories
as another way to celebrate Christmas.

In his Harper’s editorial, Howells laments the loss of the Dickensian

ghost story, waxing nostalgic for a return to scary stories with a firm
set of morals:

“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

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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.”

As the nights darken and we head towards the new year, filled with
anxiety and hope, what better emissaries are there to bring such a
message than the dead?

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