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Oh, this week’s topic is easy.
I wish Christmas ghost stories were popular today.
In Victorian England in the 1800s, telling ghost stories was a widespread Christmas tradition. There were new entries in this genre published every year for families to enjoy, and some of them became classics that are still well-known today.
I try to keep that tradition going in my own small way by seeking out and hopefully also reviewing ghost stories every December, but I’d love it if they were easier to find and if more people saw the value in reading something just a little scary at this time of the year.
Since Christmas isn’t always an easy holiday for me to enjoy for reasons beyond the scope of this post, having something to look forward to during it makes a world of difference for me. I think it’s so emotionally healthy to give people a wide variety of ways to interact with holidays they struggle with. Not everything has to be cheerful and sugary sweet all of the time in order to be meaningful.
Oh, and one of the tags on this post is Seth’s Christmas Ghost Stories because I actually reviewed quite a few classic ghost stories from the late 1800s and early 1900s on my blog a few years ago. Click on that tag to read my reviews if you wish to.
Lydia, we’ve chosen similar genres. I love a good ghost story. Dickens was good at those. There’s something lovely about reading ghost stories on cold dark nights. It’s very fitting! 😊😊
Heh, for sure!
George, my comments don’t seem to be going through on your posts. I am trying to leave them, though!
That’s a fun idea! Dickens wrote more Christmas ghost stories than the Carol. I didn’t know until reading Alison Weir that it’s an old English tradition.
I haven’t read all of Dickens ghost stories yet, but he wrote some great ones.
Found two of Seth’s Christmas Ghost Stories at my local library:
1. The Toll-House by W.W. Jacobs
2. Afterward – A Ghost Story for Christmas by Edith Wharton
A good start for Christmas horror reading – Thank you for this list
You’re welcome. Happy reading!
These days I think most of us who believe in an afterlife don’t believe in ghosts in the old English folklore sense. The spirits Scrooge’s conscience dreamed up are a different thing; I don’t believe anyone who’d been in the room with Scrooge, if he’d been based on a real person, would have seen them but I can believe he did.
I remember a few collections of Christmas ghost stories that were still in libraries in the 1970s, bound with tape or covered in wallpaper samples, with neat hand-printed titles on the backs…
Cool, and you’re probably right about that.
I’m not a horror fan, so I’ve generally not looked for ghost stories in the past, but recently I’ve been enjoying non-horror ghost stories. I’ll have to see what Christmas ghost stories I can find this year, because it sounds like a fun tradition.
There are so many of them, including a lot of non-horror ones. May you enjoy them.