No Victorian Christmas is Complete Without Ghost Stories (Part One)
It’s symbolically powerful that, in Charles Dickens’s “Christmas Carol”, Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by three ghosts: Christmas Past, Present, and Future. It serves as a metaphoric nod to the idea that during the dark of winter ghosts are all around us; an idea that the Victorians absolutely reveled in (even if it’s not an idea they completely believed in). But while Dickens offers us perhaps the most famous example of this ghostly tradition, the association between Yule and ghoul wasn’t a product of the Victorian Age.
The supernatural element of Christmas long predates Christianity, stretching back to pagan traditions around the Winter Solstice. Anthropologically speaking, it makes a lot of sense that we used to think of the coldest, darkest days of the year as the time in which our connection to the dead was at its strongest. And the Victorians capitalized on this association in their newspapers, novellas, and stories told around the parlor table.