This Christmas, find some pity for Lynda Snell MBE. Fans of the BBC radio soap The Archers know Lynda as the stalwart organiser of every Christmas panto in the fictional village of Ambridge. This year, she found herself tasked with something more arduous: voice-coaching the hard-living Mick, who had volunteered to play Father Christmas at the local pub, only for the landlords to discover that Mick had a performance voice so rasping and gravelly it was guaranteed to terrify the children.
Readers who, like me, are incurable listeners of The Archers will know the solution: Lynda sparkily announced that this year, Ambridge would host a “creepy Christmas” event, allowing Mick to snarl to his heart’s content as Krampus, not Santa, and a range of other Christmas bogeymen. Hilarity, by Ambridge standards, ensued when Lynda found herself scrambling to hide Mick and his demonic horns from the vicar.
Christmas has always been a time for ghost stories. This year, “creepy Christmas” is coming for all of us: a new remake of the vampire film Nosferatu, opens in the US on Christmas Day, and Mark Gatiss’s latest ghost story for the BBC, Woman of Stone, will screen on Christmas Eve. Yet practising Christians should make ourselves at ease with this phenomenon. For anyone invested in the story of the nativity, death has always been at the heart of Christmas. When humans grapple with death, they tell ghost stories.
Earlier this month, I was asked to give a reading at my church carol service. The text was TS Eliot’s 1927 poem, Journey of the Magi, which always seems slightly out of place against the litany of biblical texts that make up most carol services. Eliot’s poem retells the story of the Three Kings – strangers to Judea, followers of a pagan religion – whose discovery of Christ is for Eliot a parallel to the postwar destruction of traditional certainties.Journey of the Magi recalls Eliot’s 1925 poem, The Hollow Men, which reflected the struggle of First World War survivors to live in the post-traumatic haze of close encounters with death. It also gives the lie to those who pretend that Christmas is a story only about a joyous birth. “Were we led all that way for Birth or Death?” asks the narrator. “I had seen birth and death, But had thought they were different; this Birth was Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.”
When Christians celebrate Christmas, we celebrate the birth of a child born to die. Thus, as seasonal school assemblies will tell you, the inclusion of the embalming resin myrrh among the gifts of the Three Kings. For Eliot’s kings, the birth of Christ represents the death of their former existence. It also expresses the shock of a religious encounter with a divinity capable of experiencing mortal death.
You don’t have to believe in the metaphysics of any of this to appreciate that “creepy” is an apt descriptor. Those of us who do, however loosely, should recognise that the prevalence of ghost and ghoul stories in December is no threat to anyone’s belief, but a tribute to the power that Christianity’s midwinter encounter between life and death still holds on the western imagination. (The literal darkness of the season helps too.)
Krampus is not so much a ghost as a folkloric monster, a central and eastern European goat-man said to punish naughty children at Christmas time. He is sometimes thought to have pagan origins. One of the most boring features of the festive season is the number of people who pop up to lecture the rest of us that Christmas is a pagan festival, and that the imposition of a Christian winter rite constitutes a seasonal landgrab by the early church.
It is true that the Romans celebrated Saturnalia in midwinter, and that most societies have felt the need for a festival of renewal during the dead season of nature. The anti-Christian carping, however, fails to recognise just how radically the first Christmases reversed the nature of pagan winter festivals. If the conspicuous consumption of Christmas is indeed pagan in nature, the story at its heart is most certainly not: it marks a shift to a world in which treasure is stored up in heaven, not on Earth.
When we think about Christ in the manger, we see the added vulnerability of babies born in poverty, especially in societies with high rates of child mortality. No wonder that The Woman in Black, a story in which the ghost of an unwed and grief-stricken mother heralds the death of village children, was originally written as a story told on Christmas Eve. Susan Hill’s 1983 novel is set in the Victorian period, and this era, with its juxtaposition of rising fortunes and biting poverty, has always been a suitable background for such tales. The ultimate Christmas ghost story, in which the meaning of Christmas can only be deduced from an encounter with poverty, is of course Dickens’ 1843 A Christmas Carol. It remains profoundly Christian.
Orthodox Christian belief dismisses the existence of ghosts: if we’re all saved or damned, why would any unhappy soul need to haunt the Earth? Christian writers, however, have long recognised the power of using ghost stories as fictions to explore the relationship between life and death. Hill, the author of The Woman in Black, is a committed Christian, as was MR James, who is credited with perfecting the art of the English ghost story. James, born into a family of clergymen, is particularly famous for his Christmas ghost stories, which in the 1970s formed the backbone of the BBC TV series A Ghost Story for Christmas. In more recent years, the series has been revived, with Gatiss now established as lead writer.
This year’s offering, Woman of Stone, reworks an early short story by the children’s writer E Nesbit, originally titled Man-Size in Marble. Crucially, Gatiss shifts the supernatural action from Halloween to Christmas Eve. It makes perfect sense, not least when you learn more about the characters. Ghosts creep up on the vulnerable – as they do in this tale – when they are isolated. Ask yourself, as you watch Woman of Stone, why the young couple at its centre are marking Christmas alone without family or friends. No one is as isolated as the stranger alone at Christmas.
Back in The Archers, all of Lynda Snell’s fretting was for naught. Father Alan turned out to be entirely unthreatened by a few haunted tales being told in his village. Real-life Christians should share his attitude. If you want a family reminder that Christmas isn’t all about feasting and commerce, pick up a ghost story on Christmas Eve.
• Kate Maltby writes about theatre, politics and culture
