Christmas and "Scary Ghost Stories"

Factual Questions
1

I’ve always been baffled by that line in “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” claiming that there will be “scary ghost stories” and tales of glories, etc. Personally, I think the holidays could use a little horror, but that’s just me.

Is there any truth to such a tradition? My friends say it must refer to Dickens’ ghosts, but “scary ghost stories” and “A Christmas Carol” seem a little attenuated to me.

2

It is a British tradition, often overlooked nowadays because they have imported Halloween “traditions” from the US and so have their spooks in the fall like normal people…

3

Here’s one. The Water Ghost of Harrowby Hall

4

Here’s another recent thread on this topic.

5

I read that one as a kid (it was in one of those Alfred Hitchcock anthologies), but completely forgot that she appeared on Christmas.
Unfortunately for my other question, she didn’t drown in a well…

6

Christmas…where the ghost of Jesus Christ rises from the grave and terrorizes the living… {simpsons…probably butchered}

7

Oh, come on. Christmas itself is based on a ghost story. You know, a young girl - a virgin - all alone in a room, suddenly visited, “overshadowed,” and ultimately impregnated, by a mysterious spirit. Can’t get much scarier than that.

What?

8

We just had a thread about this.

When my chorus was rehearsing that song, we decided it was a reference to “A Christmas Carol.”

9

Dolly from the Family Circus has a different take on the song

10

Are you sure? I don’t know enough Simpsons quotes to say, but there’s definitely a line from Family Guy where Peter says, “Christmas, that magical time of year where the ghost of Jesus Christ rises from the grave to feed off the flesh of the living.”

11

You are probably right.

12

Pwnd!

13

Story-telling was a much more popular form of entertainment in the days radio (let alone television and the Internet), whether read aloud or recited from memory. Christmas has been associated with free time, time spent with family and friends, and therefore a good time to bring out the old stories. And ghost stories are entertaining and can be built around a suitable moral lesson, as “A Christmas Carol” certainly was. So I don’t think it’s a mystery…

Here in Troll Country, Easter brings a long break from work and school, and is associated with board games, knitting, and mystery novels. None of them have anything to do with the Christian festival or with the imminent arrival of spring, but they are things people like to do when they have the time, brought out when the calendar gives people the time. Same idea with ghost stories and old-time Christmases in Britain.

14

There are more than eight words to that song?! :eek:

15

Sorry to resurrect a ziombie (ghost?) thread, but I have what appears to be one solution to the OP’s question.

I’ve been reading The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gentleman by Washington Irving. It contains Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and, while I’m familiar with both stories, I’m not sure if I’d read the originals – at least in their entirety. And I know I’d never read the other stories in it.
I’[d heard that Irving’s stories about Christmas in this book inspred Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Having read them, I have to agree. More on that later.

first, though, of the four or five pieces devoted to Christmas (depending how you count), the last, “The Christmas Dinner”, contains accounts of people telling ghost stories at the Christmas dinner:

I’ surprised to find how muchmaterial there was for “A Christmas Carol” here – the description of the God, Old-Fashioned Christmas, with its conviviality and song, the visit to one’s boyhood village, the boyhood love of Christmas break, the way people change through time from lively, lusty passionate youths to dried-up older people, the games of blind-man’s bluff, and so on.