Do You Tell Ghost Stories on Christmas Eve?

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.

It's remarkable to see how little Christmas has changed over the past 160 years.

 People still send Christmas cards, decorate evergreen trees, 

go door-to-door caroling and stuff stockings with candy. 

Christmas, at least as most Americans celebrate, is really a product of Victorian England.

The practice of gathering around the fire on Christmas Eve to tell ghost stories

 was as much a part of Christmas for the Victorian English as Santa Claus is for us.

Isn’t there something inherently unseasonal about ghosts?

 Don’t ghosts belong with all the ghouls and goblins of Halloween? 

Not so for Victorian England.  

Not so for those of us alone at night with winter winds howling and plucking at our window shutters.

The church selected the 25th of December to celebrate Christmas because of its connection with Sol Invictus 

(the birthday of the Unconquered Sun).

 It celebrated the death of light and its subsequent rebirth the following day. 

 In addition to being the longest night of the year, however, winter solstice was also 

traditionally held to be the most haunted due to its association with the death of the sun and light. 

It was the one night of the year when the barrier between the worlds 

of the living and the deceased was thinnest. 

On Christmas Eve, ghosts could walk the earth and finish unsettled business, 

as exemplified by the apparition of Marley in Charles Dickens' Christmas masterpiece.

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.

Yet, I think The HAUNTING of Hill House was made even more terrifying

because of the characters' love, compassion, and brokenness. 

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

IS WINTER A SCARY TIME FOR YOU?

IS THERE ROOM IN HOLIDAY 

GHOST TALES 

FOR LOVE AND COMPASSION?