There is a line in one of the most cheerful Christmas songs ever recorded that almost nobody hears properly. Andy Williams sings it every December, in supermarkets and living rooms across the country, and it slips past us the way familiar things do: “There’ll be scary ghost stories, and tales of the glories of Christmases long, long ago.”
Scary ghost stories. In a song about the most wonderful time of the year.
The lyric comes from “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” written by Edward Pola and George Wyle and recorded by Williams in 1963. By then, the custom it describes had already faded from most American homes, which is why the line sounds like a pleasant nonsense to modern ears. But it is not nonsense. It is a fossil: the last visible trace of a tradition that once made Christmas Eve the most reliably haunted night of the English year.
Winter was always the season for frightening tales
Long before the Victorians got hold of it, winter belonged to the strange story. The reasons were practical before they were poetic. The agricultural year had ended. The dark arrived in the middle of the afternoon and stayed. Households gathered around the only warm, bright thing in the house and needed something to do with the hours.
Shakespeare knew the association well enough to build a play title on it. In The Winter’s Tale, young Mamillius is asked for a story and answers, “A sad tale’s best for winter. I have one of sprites and goblins” (Act II, Scene 1). He is a child repeating something he has clearly heard before. The joke only lands because the audience already understood that winter tales meant sprites and goblins.
What we should not do is dress this up as an unbroken ancient rite. There is no evidence of a formal ceremony, no druidic ghost-telling ritual waiting to be uncovered. What existed was something looser and more human: a long dark evening, a fire, and the oldest storytelling instinct there is.
Then the Victorians industrialized it
A custom becomes a tradition when someone finds a way to reproduce it at scale, and the nineteenth century was very good at reproducing things at scale.
Cheap printing arrived, and with it the Christmas annual and the Christmas number: special holiday editions of popular magazines, sold by the hundreds of thousands, designed to be read aloud in exactly the setting the stories described. Editors discovered something publishers still know. Readers who have just eaten too much and drawn the curtains against a black afternoon want, more than anything, to be pleasantly terrified.
Charles Dickens understood this better than anyone, and he was not only a contributor but an architect of it. As editor of Household Words and later All the Year Round, he commissioned and published Christmas numbers stuffed with the uncanny. It was in one of them, the 1866 collection Mugby Junction, that he published “The Signal-Man,” still one of the most quietly frightening short stories in English.
And of course there is the book everyone knows, which we have somehow stopped reading as what it plainly is. A Christmas Carol is a ghost story. Dickens says so himself in the preface, in a sentence worth reading slowly:
“I have endeavoured in this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their houses pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it.”
Charles Dickens, preface to A Christmas Carol, December 1843
Four ghosts. A chained and howling revenant. A vision of the reader’s own grave. We have wrapped that story in so much tinsel and so many singing puppets that we forget Dickens built it out of dread, and that the dread is the reason the ending works. Scrooge does not reform because someone reasons with him. He reforms because he is haunted into it.
How thoroughly ordinary the custom became
The best evidence that something is a real tradition is not the grand example. It is the offhand one, where a writer assumes everyone already knows.
Jerome K. Jerome gives us exactly that in Told After Supper (1891), a comic collection whose entire premise is that the custom is so predictable it can be teased:
“Whenever five or six English-speaking people meet round a fire on Christmas Eve, they start telling each other ghost stories.”
Jerome K. Jerome, Told After Supper, 1891
He is not introducing an idea. He is rolling his eyes at one. You cannot parody a custom that your readers have never heard of.
Henry James does something similar seven years later. The Turn of the Screw (1898) opens with a group gathered at a country house on Christmas Eve, already several ghost stories deep, waiting for the next one. The frame is not decoration. It is James signalling to his readers precisely what kind of evening they have joined.
And then there is M. R. James, a medieval scholar and provost of King’s College, Cambridge, who by long-repeated account wrote his ghost stories to be read aloud to friends and colleagues gathered at Christmas. His tales are still, more than a century later, the ones aficionados reach for first: quiet, scholarly, and genuinely unnerving.
Why it faded, and where it survived
Nobody abolished the Christmas ghost story. It simply lost its ecological niche.
The tradition depended on adults gathered around a fire in a dark room with nothing else to do. Electric light, central heating, and eventually radio and television removed all three conditions at once. Christmas also shifted decisively toward children over the same period, and a holiday organized around delighting a seven-year-old has limited appetite for the walking dead. In America the custom had never taken deep root to begin with, which is why the Andy Williams lyric strikes so many listeners as a curiosity rather than a memory.
In Britain it never quite died. The BBC has returned to the form repeatedly, most famously through its A Ghost Story for Christmas films, which began in the early 1970s and have leaned heavily on M. R. James ever since. Ask a certain generation of British viewer what Christmas sounded like and you may hear about a wind-scoured beach and a whistle that should not have been blown.
What we lose by forgetting
It would be easy to treat all this as a fun bit of trivia, and it is more than that.
The oldest midwinter festivals were never simply merry. They were held at the point of the year when the light fails, the ground hardens, and the world looks convincingly dead. Feasting and candlelight meant something precisely because of what surrounded them. A season that acknowledges the dark and then lights a fire against it is doing something braver, and frankly more interesting, than a season that pretends the dark is not there.
The Victorians, for all their sentimentality, kept both halves. They wanted the goose and the ghost. They understood that the warmth of a lit room is best measured by the blackness of the window.
So this year, when that line goes by in the supermarket, notice it. It is an invitation that has been sitting in plain hearing for sixty years.
Follow the story further
If this has left you wanting the source material, the best possible next step is to read A Christmas Carol as a ghost story rather than as a pageant you already know. We keep the complete text in our Reading Room, divided the way Dickens divided it, one stave per evening, with a short introduction and a few questions to carry with you. Read Stave One after dark and see whether Marley still seems like a children’s character.
From there, two doors open. Dickens didn’t invent Christmas, but he changed it forever traces how one small book reshaped an entire holiday. And if you would rather know what was on the table while the ghosts were being discussed, what the Cratchits actually ate takes you into a Victorian Christmas dinner in considerably more detail than the film adaptations manage.
Every tradition has a story. This one has been hiding inside a song you already know by heart.
Sources and further reading
- Charles Dickens, preface to A Christmas Carol (London: Chapman and Hall, 1843).
- Charles Dickens, “The Signal-Man,” in Mugby Junction, the Christmas number of All the Year Round (1866).
- William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, Act II, Scene 1.
- Jerome K. Jerome, Told After Supper (London: Leadenhall Press, 1891).
- Henry James, The Turn of the Screw (1898), opening frame.
- M. R. James, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (London: Edward Arnold, 1904).
- Edward Pola and George Wyle, “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” (1963), recorded by Andy Williams.