"Scary ghost stories"? Since when is that a Christmas tradition--and not only a tradition, but one supposedly as seasonal as mistletoe and caroling?
Apparently not all that long ago it was a legit thing we did--and Andy William's 1963 hit probably debuted right at the tale-end of our collective memory of that storied tradition. In 1891, British humorist Jerome K. Jerome purportedly said: "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." Evidently in Victorian England--the source of all our other modern-day yuletide practices--the "scary ghost stories" were as much a hallmark of the Christmas season as the stockings, the trees, the holly, the carols, and jolly ol' St. Nich.
It is of course no coincidence that Charles Dicken's A Christmas Carol is first and foremost a ghost story--and far less well known is that Dickens also published many other ghost stories for Christmas ("The Signal-Man" is a good one I had to read for a class last year). Also, James Joyce's 1914 story "The Dead", wherein a middle-aged Irish professor learns that his wife still pines for her lover who died at 17--that is, he learns the dead are still with us--likewise takes place during a Christmas party. It apparently used to be the rule, not the exception, to contemplate the dead on Christmas.
So why did the ghost stories disappear so thoroughly from the Holidays? Partly it may be that modern-day Halloween siphoned off all the ghost stories (at least here in America, anyways); partly it might have to do with the fact that we don't tell any stories on Christmas Eve anymore--a solid half-century of Holiday movies and TV specials has taken care of that; partly it may be that few believe in (or admit to believing in) actual ghosts anymore; partly it's yet another sign of how our cowardly modern age refuses to face death; and partly it may just finally have seemed a little gauche to discuss death during a holiday that celebrates a Birth.
But on the other hand, "scary ghost stories" fit right in with Christmas, in their own sort of way. The holiday does occur right after Winter Solstice, when the nights are longer than any other time of year--and thus when the dark things have the longest time to haunt them, no matter how bright our festive lights might try to shoo 'em away. That Birth also portends a rather spectacular Death, as you might recall--and not just any death either, but literally the Death to end all Deaths. Christmas is a day, then, to remember how close death is to us--and of what awaits us after death, too.
Which brings me to Shakespeare's Hamlet, which is also a ghost story--and early in the biting (December?) cold of Act I, Marcellus the palace guard, in trying to understand the ghost's sudden appearance and just as sudden disappearance, exclaims:
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 dares stir abroad;
The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike,
No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,
So hallow'd and so gracious is the time.
-Hamlet Act I.i.181-187
Now, perhaps Marcellus here is simply running his mouth in a frothing panic, just trying to call to mind all the disparate ghost-lore he knows in trying to understand this fearsome apparition...or, perhaps Marcellus is calmly hypothesizing that the ghost disappeared because it is the Christmas season, "Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated," when ghosts have the least power to walk the earth. For apparently on Christmas, "no spirit dares stir abroad, no fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm." Perhaps that is why the English were so cavalier to tell ghost stories on Christmas Eve--they maybe believed that this was the one night a year when the ghosts had no power to haunt them.
That also means it would truly take a powerful ghost with a terrible purpose--say, Prince Hamlet's murdered father, "murdered most foul"--to be able to walk the Earth during Christmas season. Truly, something must be rotten in the state of Denmark for a ghost to appear during Christmas.
Now, I'm not here to make a call for a return to Holiday ghost stories or what have you--we in the U.S. get quite enough of that on Halloween, like I said. Besides, I actually kinda like our modern conception of Christmas as the time of year when we stake out our brightest lights against our darkest night, when we unequivocally proclaim our faith in new birth in the face of winter's total death, when we deign not to even acknowledge the ghosts, so confident are we in the coming return to life. No, my ambitions this Christmas are a more modest:
I would just like to see a Christmas production of Shakespeare's Hamlet.
I think it would be spectacular to see a Christmas tree in the background when Claudius proclaims victory over Fortinbras, or when Prince Hamlet cries "Oh that this too, too sullied flesh would melt..." maybe while handling an unopened gift. I'd like to see holly strung about when the players perform their play within a play. I'd love to see Prince Hamlet contemplatively handle a Baby Jesus figurine from a small, nearby Nativity scene while he recites the famous "To be or not to be, that is the question..." And when Ophelia appears, I'd love to see an ironic sprig of mistletoe overhead when she tries to give back loving "remembrances of yours/That I have longèd long to redeliver" while he shouts back angrily "get thee to a nunnery!" And I cannot think of a more hauntingly beautiful setting for Ophelia's suicide than under a flickering Christmas light display. Oh yes, I think it would be absolutely lovely to see a Christmas production of Hamlet with full seasonal decorations, one that explicitly foregrounds the "scary ghost stories" of Christmases long, long ago.
If someone knows of some such production, won't you please drop me a line?
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