Joanna here, talking about ghosts and Christmas and the assumptions we make about the past. These are three topics of moderate interest and even — to me at least — related.
Consider long winter nights. This is natural to consider since we in the Northern Hemisphere have been doing the whole it-gets-dark-at-4:30-in-the-afternoon-dagnabit thing for a while now and we are very tired of it. It’s still two weeks till the tipping point of the year, the Solstice, when we start to get our sun back.
Good on you, Brother Sun, for showing up to do your job.
How did folks cope with these long, dark, cold winter nights, historically?
In the beginning, countless generations of our pre-technological ancestors spent their long winter nights huddled together, scratching fleas, giving serious effort to the goal of not freezing to death, and keeping an ear cocked for cave bears. Probably they were not bored.
Eventually folks killed off the bears and got their act together enough for a warm fire, a solid roof, and walls that kept out the wind. The edge was off the accustomed misery of existence and everybody was seeking entertainment. Families gathered round the increasingly effective hearth of a wintry evening, exchanging merry jests, roasting chestnuts, and telling each other stories.There might have been riddles involved.
It makes one understand why we, as a species, charged headlong into the electronic age and the internet.
Christmas ghost stories. You didn’t know Christmas ghost stories were a thing?
Neither did I, till I went poking around the internet looking for them.
It happens Midwinter and Christmas were considered especially ghost-appropriate.
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.
Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta
Another case in point. Marcellus, in Hamlet, pooh poohs Christmas ghosts.
Some say that ever 'gainst that season comes
Wherein our Saviour’s birth is celebrated,
The bird of dawning singeth all night long.
And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad.
The nights are wholesome. Then no planets strike,
No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,
So hallowed and so gracious is that time.
He says this, of course, just before the ghost of Hamlet’s father shows up.
I have days like this.
Shakespeare never let a foolish consistency stand in the way of a good story.
Are these the same sort of ghost tales written today?
Maybe not. I feel as though these earlier Christmas ghost stories must have had a different atmosphere than the Victorian ones we inherited or the modern ones in Horror genre. The old, old stories might be more pagan. Wilder. Crunchier around the edges.
There was a great break in transmission of traditional stories, too. The Roundheads, while they were confiscating Christmas puddings and silencing carols, did their best to send the spectral holdovers from ancient times picking up their sheets and running.
[The Christmas ghost story’s] origins have little to do with the kind of commercial Christmas we've celebrated since the Victorian age. They’re about darker, older, more fundamental things: winter, death, rebirth . . .
Kat Escher, Smithsonian magazine
Regency and especially Victorian Christmases revived the festivities and the fun of the season. Charles Dickens and his hugely popular Christmas Carol did reestablish ghost stories as part of a proper Christmas Eve family blowout.
But I don't think they quite revived the archetypal awesome Elder Gods of Yule.
Whenever five or six English-speaking people meet round a fire on Christmas Eve, they start telling each other ghost stories. 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.
Jerome K. Jerome, Told After Supper
So next time you’re reading English-set Victorian or Regency Christmas novellas you may imagine everybody finishing snap-dragon and ceasing to edge under the mistletoe and instead trooping off to the dimly-lit parlor to hear lurid and terrifying ghost stories.
Good fun, says I.
If ghost stories are very, very old Christmas traditions . . .
There are also new traditions
What’s you own new, new Christmas tradition?