Christmas Ghosts

“There’ll be scary ghost stories and tales of the glories of Christmases long, long ago..."

That is, of course, a line from the famous Christmas song, "The Most Wonderful Time of the Year" by Andy Williams.

The song might not immediately come to mind, but as soon as you hear it on your car radio, your holiday Spotify stream, or...if you're one of those intrepid souls who still does this kind of thing...while shopping in a brick and mortar store, you'll recognize it. That lyric mentioning ghost stories might seem oddly out of place, more befitting for Halloween than Christmas. But my friend Jason posted this article on his Facebook wall that nicely sums up just how pivotal ghost stories once were to the Christmas season...and still are in British tradition. In case you don't want to read it (but I really wish you would), I'll render the gist...

Hate to break it to you, but Christmas does not have Christian origins. Its genesis is in the pagan observations of Winter Solstice and Yule festivals of the British Isles. As the sunlight failed and the temperature dropped, pagans would bring evergreens inside their dwellings as a means of holding on to life while all else went dormant and dead. Therefore, the traditional Christmas tree has absolutely nothing to do with Christ. Additionally, December is the darkest time of the year. This naturally lent itself to people gathering around fires and telling stories of spirits, goblins, and hauntings. These narratives, composed both textually and orally, in time grew woven into the overall fabric of Christmas.

Case in point: A Christmas Carol written by Charles Dickens. It is likely the most famous example of a Christmas ghost story and is retold every year during the season. There have been innumerable incarnations of this book, including one with an amazing performance by George C. Scott as Ebeneezer Scrooge, and one version where John Taylor of Duran Duran plays the Ghost of Christmas Present, but I still think A Muppet Christmas Carol remains my favorite rendition. As I said, this is but the most famous version of the "Christmas ghosts" literary subgenre.

M.R. James was a British academic, a medievalist, and at one time the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University. He also loved writing ghost stories, something that might be snobbishly shunned by a contemporary academic as being "beneath them." James, on the other hand, would write a new haunting to read to his fellow faculty members every year at Christmastime. I highly recommend his collection of ghost stories, Casting the Runes, and somewhere I've heard tell of a BBC (I think) production where Christopher Lee just sits in a candlelit room at King's College and reads James' hauntings. Could it get any better? Point being, while we on this side of the pond have confined our mainstream consumption of spooky tales to Halloween, ghost stories remain a staple for a British Christmas.

And yet...

And yet...

I wonder if contemporary Americans aren't haunted by Christmas ghosts in other ways, beyond the literal. There is another rhetorical interpretation.

Christmas is one of my favorite holidays and I'm always glad to see it come around each year. However, each successive one fails to live up to my happiest memories. There's this shift, a palpable shift I can almost pinpoint in my early adolescence where I said to myself, "this just isn't as cool as it used to be." To be clear, it had nothing to do with presents. Our family Christmas tree that once looked tall and awe-inspiring to my little self, eventually became something I could probably twirl around in my hands.

My favorite Christmas memories all involve staying at my grandparents' farmhouse, one of the most special places in the world to me. Just being around them and feeling that joyance and warmth, plus the buzz of magical excitement on Christmas Eve and the anticipation of the following morning, that time when I first got my Shogun Warrior or my Space:1999 Eagle, it wanders into cliche but I must say it was magical.

Both of my grandparents are dead now. Their wonderful house now belongs to someone I don't even know. I will never go back there again and I will never have those Christmas experiences again.

That doesn't mean all future yuletide seasons will be dour. Not at all. They just won't seem the same, and that will haunt me...like specters of a lost land I can never return to.

I know something about that. In several ways. Last Christmas was especially tough after losing SJC. This year I have much to be thankful for, very much indeed. Just the same, it will be very difficult in its own right, for reasons I'd rather not get into. All of it does make me wonder about the connection between Christmas and "home," however we may define the latter. We are pulled towards home at this time of the year with the gravitational force of a dead star.

There's a song for that. It's called "Christmas at Sea" and it's by Sting from his album, If Upon a Winter's Night (go give it a listen for it's fantastic stuff.) In it, a sailor fights the elements on Christmas Day, trying to get back to "the house above the coast guard" for it is, as he says, "the house where I was born." He will brave wave and wind and "haul frozen rope" just to get back.

We all just want to be back home. Sometimes we can't be. Sometimes it's a place that now only exists in our memories, even if it's merely deceptively simpler times. We can see it, we can feel it, we can smell it, we can almost reach out and touch it...but we just can't seem to get there. And it haunts us. In our current times, that may be the American version of writing the Christmas ghost story. Maybe it's more universal than just our shores.

Again, I have much to be thankful for. So many have it so much worse than I do. The Christmas song "Do They Know It's Christmas?" reminds me of that as Bono belts out a plaintive "Well tonight thank God it's them instead of you" (he didn't much like that line and I can certainly understand why, but it sure did shake up 13 year-old Jonny and make him at least start to think about what Ethiopian famine and true want and need must be like.)

Yet even the best of us are sometimes haunted.

For more on British Christmas ghost stories, The Guardian (hey, I once wrote for them!) published a good one last year. Be on the look out for another this Christmas. Also, Jason tells me that Sax Rohmer, creator of the pulpy villain, Fu Manchu, has a collection of Christmas ghost stories as well.

Plenty to choose from if you're lucky enough to have a fire to sit round this season and feel haunted.


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