How chilling ghost stories became a Christmas tradition

‘A sad tale’s best for winter,’ says little Mamillius in The Winter’s Tale: ‘I have one/ Of sprites and goblins…’ (He is dead by Act III.)

Ghost stories have always been best told on a midwinter night — preferably aloud, in a group drawn close together around a blazing fire. Pleasure comes from awareness of the icy cold and dark, hemming our small convivial light: there is a particular frisson in the contrast between ‘in here’ and ‘out there’, between the snug ‘us’ and a possibly malign ‘them’, the known and the unknown. And Christmas Eve, traditionally, was the time to swap ghost stories — drawing upon the early Christian notion that spirits and demons had a peculiar freedom on the night before an especially holy day. Halloween, the night before All Hallows or All Saints day, has now usurped this licence; but in Victorian times, as Jerome K. Jerome remarked: ‘The average orthodox ghost does his one turn a year, on Christmas Eve, and is satisfied.