It is Winter Solstice (冬至) today, the day with the shortest sunlight, as I start writing this piece as an introduction to Floating Projects’ mysterious film discussion of a 1961 ghost-story film.
feature image: a scene from Ingmar Bergman's Fanny & Alexamder (1982).
In European traditions, telling ghost stories at Christmas is part of a broader cultural practice to cope with shortening daily sunlight into the dark, cold winter. Christmas and Winter Solstice were linked because early Christians in the Roman period chose December 25th to celebrate Jesus’ birth (estimating 9 months of pregnancy from the Immaculate Conception of Jesus on 25th March). By the 4th century, the celebration of Jesus' birth on December 25th became widespread in Rome. This aligns with the existing pagan winter solstice festivals such as Saturnalia and the birth of the Unconquered Sun, that is, the light of the world, as days are getting longer after winter solstice. Early Christmas customs also incorporated other hope-bearing pagan traditions like feasting, gift-giving, and the use of evergreens (plants like holly, ivy and firs) for Christmas decorations, suggesting resilience against winter’s darkness and the arrival of spring.
The pagan side of the ghost-story-telling tradition rests on the belief that the Winter Solstice is that moment when the veil between the human and other worlds are thinning to allow the supernatural and the spirits of the dead to roam in the long, dark nights of the world of the living. [1] This reminds me so much of the 14th day of the 7th month in the Lunar calendar, when the gate of the underworld opens and the non-living dead crawls back to the world to get fed and to snatch those alive to join them.
In the UK, ghost stories as a Christmas-time tradition was popularized in the Victorian time in the 19th century, notably with Charles Dicken’s work A Christmas Carol (1843). But the practice started at least a century before it became a popular practice in the Victorian time, when supernatural spirits were still considered a topic of serious scientific examination. [2] A key reference to sitting around the fire to tell ghost story is the book Round about our coal fire: or, Christmas entertainments. (1732-34) [3] There is, of course, widespread citing of the character Prince Mamillius in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale (1609-1611/1623) who says,
“A sad tale’s best for winter. I have one
Of sprites and goblins."
(Act II, Scene 1) [4]
R.S. Thomas's poem "Hallowe'en" explores the thin veil between life and death, the past and present, using the traditional night of ghosts to reflect on memory, loss, and the lingering presence of the departed in his austere Welsh landscape, warning spirits against returning to a world they no longer fit, a reflection of his spiritual depth and engagement with Welsh folklore and modern alienation. In “Hallowe’en,” the poet is talking directly to the ghost who is making an attempt to enter the other's world. [1]
It would seem the welcoming of light to survive cold long nights are inseparable. The fact is, living in the 21st-century, we may easily slight what it was like sitting through a long, cold winter evening to endure darkness when there was no electricity.( Although the first home lit electrically was around 1878 in the UK, mass home adoption had to wait until the 1920s.) Now we have to imagine a few friends and family members getting together around the fire in candle-lit interiors to tell one another ghost stories; I suppose staying warm was a big thing. Scare and thrill for spiritual being haunting seems to augment the sense of togetherness.
What is the connection between “long, dark winter nights," “family gathering" around the telling of spooky stories as a performance? What is the intuitive, expressive, psychological or objective link between ghost stories and the Christmas season?
- *Perfect atmosphere. The long, dark winter nights and family gatherings created an ideal setting for spooky narratives, noted by writers like Shakespeare ("A sad tale's best for winter").
*Remembrance: Stories served as a way to remember the dead and acknowledge the supernatural forces of winter.
*Storytelling: Families gathered around fires to tell tales of ghosts, monsters, and ancestral heroes, bridging the darkness with stories.
From a more analytical point of view, the following is articulated about the anthropological significance of ghost-story-telling in a recent symposium:
The charm of telling and listening to ghost stories hinges on “descriptions.” Many ghost stories deploy mis-en-scene like descriptive dynamics, constantly zooming in and out of details, alternating between descriptive haptic-spatial view and narration, that is, summary, shortening and against the larger backdrop). Sounds, too, are often turned into descriptive object; sound description is itself drama. The real protagonist is the environment and sight and sound surrounding a character or characters. The physical world is personified often to the degree that human characters are functions of the physical world.
Of darkness versus light and glamour, I recall a few personal favourite horror films.
Horror does not necessarily grow out of darkness the glamorously lit hall and corridors of the Overlook Hotel in Stanley Kubrick's the Shining (1980) where ghosts all gather in their party outfits in the ballroom. And yet of an extreme case of darkness and the ghostly domain, I cannot help thinking of the mood in Alejandro Amenábar's The Others (2001). Sunlight must be reduced to the use candle lights in pitch darkness reinforced by thick curtains, day or night. In the dimly candle-lit sessions of evening story-telling, the children could only read the bible or orally recapitulate Dante's “Inferno” in his Divine Comedy (1321), the only way Mother (played by Nicole Kidman) could ensure her boy and girl's survival, not knowing that they are in fact already dead and would “live” in that house forever.
There is also my favourite Ingmar Bergman film Fanny & Alexander (1982) in which the emphasis of warmth and light is to anticipate cold and darkness. Fanny and Alexamder’s bourgeoise home is full of joy and magic with a big banquet; they tell their own self-created ghost stories to each other. And yet the glittering lights in the warm Christmas home is simply one-step away from the death of their father, taken over by their fright and terror in a cold, bleak, cruel Protestant home of their step-father’s. The story also references Shakespeare's Hamlet and its Ghost with ghost relatives hanging out with those alive.
There was no questioning of the presence of the ghosts when M.R. James (Montague Rhodes James) published his Ghost Stories of an Antiquary in 1904. His ghost stories emphasized clear scares without ambiguity of truth, nor do they highlight any graphic gore, which stand in stark contrast with Henry James' modernist rendering of horror.
We may also look for A Ghost Story for Christmas, a strand of annual British short television films originated between 1971 and 1978 to be broadcast on BBC One, which was revived by the BBC since 2005.
REFERENCE
[1] R.S. Thomas's poem "Hallowe'en": https://ramblingatthebridgehead.wordpress.com/2018/10/30/halloween-by-r-s-thomas/
[2] “Forgotten Tradition: Chilling Christmas Ghosts" [link to video]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5n6oSoEatJQ
[3] Round about our coal fire: or, Christmas entertainments. ... Together with some curious memoirs of old Father Christmas; shewing what hospitality was in former times, and how little there remains of it at present. 1796
https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_round-about-our-coal-fir_the-dedication-signed-d_1796/page/n7/mode/2up
[4] Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale: quote from Act II, Scene 1: https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/the-winters-tale/read/2/1/
[5] “Ghost Stories for the Winter Solstice”; Signum Symposium, Signum University, 21 December 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQMevdgqTZA
