Why do we tell ghost stories at Christmas?
There is a real tradition within English culture of sitting in front of a fire and speaking of ghosts. Charles Dickens uses the tradition to great effect to describe the redemption of Ebenezer Scrooge. The great biblical scholar Montague Rhodes James also entertains the fellows at King's College with a ghost story for Christmas. But why?
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At Christmas, we reach the darkest point of the year. The sun sets in the early afternoon; it is cold, wet and windy. The Christmas lights twinkle somewhat ineffectively against the coming night. It is a time when we cannot see well and we still have the fear about what may be lurking in the darkness.
We try to dispel that fear by raising it to entertainment. We acknowledge our fear and give it some fantastic reality as a tale of ghosts and spirits. What is interesting is that these tales are moral. Someone does something wrong and they pay for it at the withered hands of some spectre. It shows that human beings still live in fear of the consequences of our actions.
We may not know it. We may pooh-pooh the idea. But we are a people who still live in fear. We have to admit that we are afraid of the dark. The world is very dark at the moment.
[PAUSE]
The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light.
We may be haunted by the ghosts of our actions but no ghost can abide standing in the light to be seen for what it is. Ghosts are insubstantial and, the moment the reality is seen, they dwindle and fade into a laughable nothingness. Shadows evaporate when the light shines. The imperfect vanishes away when the perfect comes.
Our tradition of telling ghost stories at Christmas expresses Humanity's fear of the dark and the reality of the evil that stalks the shadows looking to devour us. In confessing this fear, we are able to turn to the Light which is appearing. Our antidote for the ghosts is a little baby lying in the manger. We realise our need for His tiny presence. We find comfort in His tiny limbs reaching out of that stall for a simple and unconditional cuddle. We see the hope shining out of His tiny eyes as they take their first blinking look out into the world He created.
[PAUSE]
It is so simple to exorcise a ghost: we just show it the Baby but we have to let the Baby in first! We only reach Christmas Day in our lives by flinging wide the stable doors to let the light stream in.
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