Now that we have passed the point of no return (also known as Thanksgiving), we have plunged irrevocably into the Christmas season, that time of the year which is richest in traditions, be they old or new, religious or secular, serious or lighthearted, shared with millions worldwide or kept hidden behind closed doors and reserved for the private humiliation of those we hold dearest.
Decorating a tree with lights and ornaments, kissing under the mistletoe, hanging stockings, singing carols — these widespread traditions are the instantly recognizable emblems of the season, while other rituals are restricted for a select circle. For one household the season’s signifier may be listening to Dad read the nativity story from the Gospel of Luke, for another group it may be gathering around the television to watch It’s a Wonderful Life, while for yet another family it may be nervously edging away as Uncle Carl begins his annual Yuletide disquisition on America’s inexorable slide into socialism.
Traditions come and traditions go, however. An observance that has largely faded from view is the once-widespread custom of reading ghost stories on Christmas Eve. As with many Christmas traditions, this one began in Victorian England. Of course long before the Victorians, Christmas was associated with the miraculous and the supernatural, but during those middle and later years of the nineteenth century, the season became explicitly linked with the overtly ghostly as well.
The Victorian era was the high-water mark of the traditional ghost story, which was a staple of the magazines and inexpensive books that vied for the attention of an expanding and prosperous middle class. These publications were hungry for content, and ghost stories helped fill that need. Some of the form’s greatest masters — Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, Amelia Edwards, Mary Braddon, Edith Nesbit, and M.R. James, among many others — wrote during this period.
However, it was Charles Dickens who was, more than any other person, responsible for the identification of one particular time of year — the Christmas season — with the explicitly ghostly. Dickens loved a good ghost story; he had, in the words of his friend and biographer, John Forster, “something of a hankering after them.”
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