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“Now I remember those old winter’s tales that speak of spirits and
ghosts by night.”
- Christopher Marlowe
"Christmas Eve is a genial, festive season, and to counter balance,
we love to muse upon graves, and dead bodies, and murders, and blood.”
- Jerome K. Jerome
Did you like the Archangel, Darael, in my last post?
He is a major character in my Christmas Ghost Story, Beware the Jade Christmas,
though he patiently waits until the 2nd Act to enter the fray ...
And like the Angel Provocateur he is,
Darael never lets those around him feel comfortable ...
nor he is he even comfortable or sure about himself.
Why do people love to tell Christmas ghost stories?
The telling of such stories goes back even before the publication of A CHRISTMAS CAROL (1843).
The tradition of telling holiday ghost stories goes much farther back:
farther than the Nativity though not before the sense of its need.
When the nights grow long, and the year is growing to a close, it’s only natural that people feel an instinct to gather together.
At the edge of the year, it also makes sense to think of people and places that are no longer with us.
Christmas ghost stories are older than the Victorian one with which we all are familiar.
These stories are about darker, older, more fundamental subjects:
winter, death, rebirth, and the certainty that our black deeds always return demanding their wages.
As Dickens wrote,
the ghosts of Christmas are really the past, present and future, swirling around us in the dead of the year.
They’re a reminder that we’re haunted, all the time, by good ghosts and bad,
and that they all have something to teach us.
Merry Eerie Christmas
And please consider spending a mere 99 cents for a thought-provoking stroll
through the ghostly haunts of 1946 New Orleans with a mysterious angel as your guide.
The paperback is only $5.99!
Never thought about it but there are a lot of Christmas ghost stories.
ReplyDeleteMerry Christmas, my friend.
I'm reading a book of Dicken's Christmas ghost stories, a paperback I picked up I think at a book sale last year. So many ghost stories at Christmas I, even as a horror writer, had never even known about until fairly recently. I hope you and your family have a very Merry Christmas!
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