Christmas, like other public holidays, can be a strange time. For a little while, all the normal rules of life fall away, the relentless striving and moving of the country falls still, and we are thrust — sometimes uncomfortably — back into our essential humanity. It’s at Christmas we must confront our given rather than chosen relationships, grappling with relatives and spouses, children and cousins, home towns and old school friends at the pub on a Christmas eve. Our carefully constructed adult identities are pushed into the cupboard, and we’re clad in holiday motley, stuffed into Christmas jerseys, and forced to sit in a room for a day with the people that fate, biology and God have ordained for us.
The deep happiness and comfort of home and hearth can act as the profoundest consolation at this time, yet also impose painful expectations, especially on those who have lost family or for whom family is a strained and contested thing. If all this seems like a gloomy introduction to my Christmas watchlist, then ghost stories are just as seemingly jarring a choice for the holidays. Unlike Halloween, associated with death and the beyond, Christmas at first glance is a holiday of new life and hope, untouched by the shadows.
The intense joys and warmth of Christmas are drawn in precise proportion to the subtle terrors of the darkening year
Yet delve deeper into the story, and the tradition of the Christmas ghost story starts to make a lot more sense. If the light of new life in the Christian story is entering the world, it is a world previously veiled in darkness, and a light that enters in secret and under the cover of darkness.
The intense joys and warmth of Christmas are drawn in precise proportion to the subtle terrors of the darkening year. The nativity story is one of a fearful family moved helplessly by the power of a distant state — the saviour of mankind is born in a stable because Mary and Joseph had to fill in the 1st century equivalent of a tax form. And where there are taxes, death is not far behind, as King Herod unleashes the worst horror imaginable. God incarnate is smuggled out of a homeland rendered a slaughterhouse of children by a corrupt puppet of a foreign power.
This story is not just about human wickedness, but supernatural good and evil. The Magi divine the secrets of the cosmos in the heavens, guided by a distant star glittering in the blackness. If Christ has come to unseat Satan, the “the god of this world” who “hath blinded the minds of them which believe not”, then the forces of darkness are menacingly arrayed against him. Even for non-Christians, the figures of the magi, trying to navigate a mysterious reality by the faint illumination of ambiguous symbols, and unwittingly stumbling into danger along the way, are urgently familiar and relatable.
This play of light and shadow is always more evident in traditional celebrations than it is in the modern, commercialised and sanitised versions. Reflecting on Christmas’s shadow is helpful not just as a sign of seriousness, but because it offers a real consolation to those for whom Christmas is not easy, and a touch of chill that adds to the warmth of the festivities.
So why not cast off the Hollywood schmalz, ignore the silly ironic action movies, and instead watch a classic BBC MR James adaptation as you nurse your mulled wine on Christmas Eve? MR James himself, was of course a devout Anglican and a son of the vicarage, and it is perhaps not altogether a coincidence that he helped instantiate the modern horror genre.
In the 1970s, the BBC revived the tradition of Christmas Eve ghost stories, adapting four MR James stories, a ghost story by Dickens, and a number of original stories written for the series. If you’re looking for a new Christmas tradition, you could do a lot worse than getting a boxed set of the classic series A Ghost Story for Christmas.
In faithful and classic MR James fashion, the short films are full of shadowy figures lurking in the choir stalls, strange vicars, sinister libraries, cursed relics and the English landscape at its uncanny best. My personal favourite, A Warning to the Curious, involves a royal artifact and the Norfolk seaside, interweaving national mythology and the paranormal.
Happily, the tradition has since continued, with a run of ghost stories adapted by Mark Gattis in more recent years, including one for this Christmas Eve, adapted from an EF Benson story, and starring Joanna Lumley.
Christmas films are often defined by either direct references to Christmas, or a “christmas message” about belonging, family, or giftgiving. What ranks a yuletide MR James alongside a more obvious Christmas ghost story like A Christmas Carol is its opening up of a hidden world. If the more familiar idea of Christmas as a celebration of birth is central to the holidays, we have sometimes forgotten the other significance, embodied by Epiphany — the revelation of a secret order, and the waging of an invisible war.
Traditional Christmas stories often involve dreams and visions on Christmas Eve, whether it’s the tale of the Nutcracker, a Christmas Carol, or the Little Match Girl. Like Holy Saturday, it is a day poised between the absence and arrival of the living God, a liturgical gulf outside of ordinary time, in which we are more open to the supernatural.
Renaissance magic and unquiet spirits, forbidden books and unnamed horrors lurking in tombs, wells and towers, are more than just the fears of a fertile imagination casting itself on the seedbed of English gothic. In many respects, MR James, along with others like fellow Christian horror writer (and son of the vicarage) Arthur Machen, anticipated and invented the idea of “cosmic horror” that would be popularised in more materialistic and nihilistic fashion by HP Lovecraft.
The notion of evil that is not only supernatural, but woven into an invisible order and structure that infuses nature and culture, is an idea deeply resonant in Christian notions of a world captured by original sin and the influence of fallen angels. Yet if deep contemplation of reality is a source of despair for authors like Lovecraft, in a Christian context, horror always and also points towards hope. The confrontation with ultimate evil directs us to an ultimate good, and the existence of cosmic horror is closely tied to the possibility of cosmic consolation.
When we return home for Christmas, many of us will be wrestling with sudden loss, family conflict, or the disappointments of the past year. Rather than uncomfortably nursing these feelings in the artificial radiance of the modern Christmas, we should make sense of them through the deeper and more ancient rhythms of the turning of the year, in which light and shadow are the interplay of an unseen harmony. We should embrace Christmas as a season to mourn our sorrows and embrace our joys with equal passion. Or more simply: we should watch a ghost story at Christmas, and shiver with fearful delight.
