Christmas used to be a time for telling ghost stories?
Written By Chauncey Haworth
There are a lot of traditions associated with Christmas. We have the tree and the nativity scene, mistletoe, and holly. But there’s another tradition that goes back centuries: telling ghost stories around the fireplace on Christmas Eve.
Ghost stories have a long history in England, dating back to medieval times. In the Middle Ages, people spent a lot of time indoors, probably because of wolves… those things are terrifying. So, they would gather around their fireplaces and tell each other scary stories called “winter tales.” Long winter nights and the natural stillness created an atmosphere ripe for storytelling, especially tales that tapped into primal fears.
Charles Dickens took the tradition one step further in 1843 when he wrote A Christmas Carol. The story of Ebenezer Scrooge’s redemption is still a classic today. It has been adapted for film several times, and other writers have used it as inspiration for their own stories.
As a fan of horror, I find that winter holds a special place. It’s the perfect setting for isolation, making it an ideal time for horror.
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Personally, I’m striving to keep the darker side of Christmas alive. Christmas Day can be all about Jesus and happiness—or commercialism and happiness, depending on which brand you subscribe to. But Christmas Eve should represent the fear, the history. In a world of computers, space exploration, and medical advancements, there’s something cathartic about going back to your roots and fearing the ghosts and demons in the darkness for a couple of nights a year.
This year, we close the issue with The Ritual. The Ritual is a short story written by American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft in 1923 and published in the January 1925 issue of Weird Tales magazine.
The story is a first-person narrative of a narrator’s experience in Kingsport, Massachusetts, as he visits the town seeking his relatives and instead discovers a Latin translation of the Necronomicon, which contains a passage about an ancient Yule rite.
