Eve
I’m a rabid proponent of the Christmas Eve ghost story tradition. Seriously, foaming at the mouth, rabies-like symptoms, everything. Talk about an unbalanced response. I get particularly riled up when the idiot box shows no acknowledgement of the concept, choosing to rerun, I don’t know, fucking Dad’s Army or something instead. It probably irritates me more than a seasonal lack of It’s A Wonderful Life, and brothers and sisters, that is a lot of irritation right there. That said, I don’t actually know where the tradition came from in the first place.
A Christmas Carol, of course, is perhaps the most well-known of all of them, and also one that has popularised the concept, along with the enduring imagery of Yuletide snow and Kermit the Frog as a book-keeper (perhaps more of a ret-con but nonetheless canon round our way). And really, is there anything that suggests Christmas more than the works of Algernon Blackwood or M.R. James? Well, yes, I suppose. Loads. Birth of the Messiah, for a start.
But again, much like Halloween, we’re talking about something older than Christianity here. Midwinter feasts, fires in the darkness, the hope of spring. The ever-pressing cycle of death and rebirth. And maybe that’s all parcelled into a tradition that leads to Christopher Lee’s fireside story-telling, and me watching The Haunting on the night before Christmas (absolutely the best way to experience it for the first time).
Because if midnight on January 1st represents progression and change, maybe the 24th of December is a little more backward looking. Of course it’s a time of warm remembrance; that kind of thing comes with the territory with human festivities. And let’s not forget acrimony, which also rears its head wherever family members gather. But what about the past’s other shadows, the things better left unremembered? At festival time everything has its place, and these shades too must reveal themselves, and what better time than the night before the feast?
