“As the last stroke ceased to vibrate,
[Scrooge] remembered the prediction of old
Jacob Marley, and, lifting up his eyes,
beheld a solemn Phantom, draped and hooded,
coming like a mist along the ground towards
him…
The Phantom slowly, gravely, silently approached.
When it came near him, Scrooge bent down
upon his knee; for in the air through which
this Spirit moved it seemed to scatter gloom
and mystery.
It was shrouded in a deep black garment,
which concealed its head, its face, its
form, and left nothing of it visible save
one outstretched hand. He knew no more,
for the Spirit neither spoke nor moved.
‘I am in the presence of the Ghost
of Christmas Yet To Come? Ghost of the Future!
I fear you more than any spectre I have
seen. But as I know your purpose is to do
me good, and as I hope to live to be another
man from what I was, I am prepared to bear
your company, and do it with a thankful
heart. Will you not speak to me?’
The
Last of the Spirits
John
Leech
Full-page
illustration for Dickens's Christmas Carol:
The Last of the Spirits 1843
It gave him no reply. The hand was pointed
straight before them.
‘Lead on! Lead on! The night is waning
fast, and it is precious time to me, I know.
Lead on, Spirit!’”
Charles Dickens, “A Christmas Carol”
(1872)
Like Samhain before it the Christmas season
-- the pagan Yule -- is another time when
the veil between this world and the next
becomes thin; as the Wheel of the Year groans
slowly in the Winter darkness, beings from
the supernatural plane often take the opportunity
to enter the world of the living.
Among the Victorians of Dickens’ day,
the telling of ghost stories was a favorite
Christmas tradition and these stories, though
often imbued with more hope than the horror
of their Halloween counterparts, harked
back to an ancient, wilder time when mankind
shivered in the bleak dearth of Winter around
the light of a feeble fire, little protection
from the ghosts, ghouls and other supernatural
beings that prowled the frosty night. At
once envious and hateful of the light, these
creatures nevertheless would crowd around
the households of the innocent and righteous
to warm themselves in the glowing memories
of home and loved ones and Christmases long
past – of life itself.
But as most students of the paranormal know,
visitations by the dead at Christmas time
and intrusions by malevolent spirits from
the dark heart of winter are not simply
the stuff of history. In fact, a large portion
of ghostly encounters occur at holidays
such as Christmas or at other times when
families gather to celebrate their own unique
traditions, a fact that lends some credence
to the theory that many dead relatives and
friends take advantage of the holiday welcome
mat time and time again.
“I’ll
be home for Christmas,
You can plan on me,
Please have snow and mistletoe
And presents round the tree.
Christmas Eve will find me
Where the love light gleams,
I’ll be home for Christmas
If only in my dreams…” |
|
Yuletide visitations by the unquiet dead
have been reported since the earliest times
and are not solely limited to the Christian
celebration of Christmas. Pagan peasants
throughout the black forests of Europe knew
Winter as a time of rekindling connections
long before the advent of the faith of Christ
– some of these connections could
be otherworldly, as well. Unexplained knocks
at the door on Christmas Eve, the appearance
of lovingly hand-tooled toys and crafts,
even the mysterious consumption of large
quantities of mulled Christmas wine, all
are events that have come down through generations
as linked to this special time of year.
Not only is the veil between the worlds
tenuous during this time of feast and rejoicing,
but some spiritualists have suggested that
whatever “rules” apply to the
forlorn world of the dead are somehow relaxed
amidst the Yuletide joy, allowing the dear
departed to return and make their presence
known among the living.
A Christmas Phone Call from
the Dead
“My mother passed away three years
ago. We were very close and I miss her daily.
Last Christmas evening, I went to bed and
woke up to the phone ringing. I answered
it and a voice that was very familiar to
me said, ‘Hello there!’ It was
my mother’s voice. The line had a
static noise and it sounded to cut in and
out. I said, ‘This can’t be
you, mom! You’re dead!’ She
said, ‘Oh, come on now!’ She
sounded a bit agitated and then we were
cut off. My 16-year-old daughter was sleeping
in the next room and also heard the phone
ring that night. I know it was my mother’s
voice: she had a Norwegian accent and it
was her!”
Some connections between the dead and the
holiday season persist for generations.
For instance, the ghost of Anne Boleyn,
the ill-fated second wife of England’s
King Henry VIII, has been sighted at Christmas
gazing forlornly from the bridge over the
River Eden, not far from Hever Castle, site
of a Boleyn ancestral home. The Queen is
said to toss a sprig of Christmas holly
into the icy river before disappearing into
the frosty night.
The ghost of a lost lady is sighted walking
along the lonely roads outside Brigg, Lincolnshire.
She is said to be the ghost of a lonely
old woman who left her home to beg money
to buy a Christmas lunch but became lost
in the snow and froze to death somewhere
along the road she now haunts. Appearing
dressed in ragged clothing from the early
1800’s, she has been known to approach
strangers asking for directions or begging
for money. It is said that to refuse her
money is extreme bad luck.
In Gloucester, Massachusetts there is a
home dating from Colonial times whose current
owners continue a long tradition of leaving
food and drink at the back door for their
Christmas ghost. Said to be the wretched
soul of a young fisherman lost at sea, the
legend is told that one Christmas night,
generations ago, the house was roused by
knockings on the back door. When the door
was opened, there on the stoop, shivering
and dripping wet, as if just plucked from
the Sea, was the thin, frail figure of a
boy, barely in his teens, standing barefoot
on the snowy stoop. Brought inside and seated
by the fire, the drenched young man was
covered in a blanket and given warm punch
to drink; the cook set about getting some
food. But when the mistress of the house
returned with dry clothing for the boy she
cried out in alarm – the chair by
the fire was empty, the blanket and mug
on the ground. The boy was gone. Nor had
any seen him leave when just outside the
door the hall boy was gathering wood to
stoke the fire. “Tis a ghost have
been here!” the cook said flatly.
And from that time, in that house, the tradition
has been kept to feed the poor lost fisherman
who returned from his watery grave one Christmas
long ago.
These days encounters with the dead at Christmas
are not often so dramatic, though they are
sometimes equally as unsettling. One woman’s
true story involves the quaint holiday tradition
in her home of watching “White Christmas,”
the movie starring Bing Crosby and Danny
Kaye that made Irving Berlin song of that
name even more popular.
“My mom and I used to always watch
it, every year,” relates Sylvia, a
New Orleans native. “We never missed
a year.” Except for the Christmas
that came after the death of her beloved
mother: “That year I tried to avoid
watching it,” she said. “I just
didn’t want to get even more depressed.”
Having successfully eluded the movie, Sylvia,
alone in the house, was preparing for bed
when she heard the familiar sound of Bing
Crosby’s voice coming from the sick
room where her mother had spent her last
days. Sylvia, standing in the hall, distinctly
heard the sound of Bing Crosby crooning
“White Christmas,” but when
she went to investigate she found the room
dark and undisturbed, just as it was when
her mother had died. “I even went
over to the TV in there to feel if it had
been on,” said Sylvia. “I don’t
know why that would make any sense, but
there was just no way to explain it.”
Unless, as Sylvia now believes, her mother
was just watching her favorite holiday movie
one last time…
Some people have claimed that departed relatives
have returned to finish wrapping gifts,
to baste the holiday turkey and even to
attend church services with their loved
ones. Others have discovered departed relatives
appearing as shadows and ghostly images
in Christmas photos and even videos. One
family submitted an interesting tale involving
capturing what they believe is a dead relative
on video.
“Our kids were getting to that age,
you know, where they were a little more
creative in trying to figure out their Christmas
presents,” said Dean from Baton Rouge.
“So I set up this small web cam on
my computer and focused it on the tree and
the presents.” Hoping to catch his
kids in the act, when Dean viewed the camera
footage the next morning he discovered a
shadowy vapor moving slowly around the tree,
hovering around the gifts. “At one
point the tree moves ever so slightly, and
then there’s this disturbance, like
a mist on the lens or something.”
Interestingly, Dean’s father had passed
away earlier that same year and his presence
was, according to Dean and other family
members, “very strong that year. He
loved Christmas and there’s no doubt
in my mind that he came back to check out
the tree and the gifts we were giving his
grandkids!”
“Christmas Eve was a time for human
feasting – and for something else.
In Scandinavia, people said, the ghosts
of the dead returned in the night to visit
the homes they had loved. Their descendants
welcomed them: After the meal of the living
was finished, food was left for the dead.
Then the living retired, so their ancestors
might come into the warmth and the light
to make their old Christmas revels once
more.”
Old Scandinavian Folk Belief
GHOSTLY BELLS AT CHRISTMAS
“Hear
the sledges with the bells –
Silver bells!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
In the icy air of night!
While the stars that oversprinkle
All the heavens seem to twinkle
With a crystalline delight;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinnabulation that so musically
wells
From the bells, bells bells,
Bells, bells, bells,
From the jingling and the tinkling of the
bells!”
-- from “The Bells” by Edgar
Allan Poe
 |
|
The sound of ghostly bells pealing in the
still Christmas night is a frequent odd
occurrence of the season reported throughout
England and in parts of rural America. Tolling
bells heard at night are most often associated
with death of someone nearby, however, at
this magical time of year the sound of ghostly
bells is not at all so ominous.
Still the experience can be disconcerting.
In England, for example, there have been
many reports of the sound of bells ringing
out on Christmas night from the sites of
monasteries and cloisters destroyed in Henry
VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries
in 1539. During the destruction of Evesham
Abbey the huge church bells were cast into
the nearby river. In the succeeding years
there have been several reports of the sound
of bells resonating under the water on Christmas
Eve night.
Locations where villages once stood have
also been reported as haunted by ghostly
bells at Christmastide. Places where little
evidence is left of human settlement, villages
and towns that were wiped out by plague
or famine, are said to still hold the memories
of happier times and in the still Christmas
night, when all the world rejoices, the
clear ringing of long lost bells still sounds
out.
Incidences such as these have been reported
in the New England states and throughout
rural America. Buildings that once served
as makeshift churches in the founding years
of America still experience the ghostly
sounds of bells ringing at this special
time of year, even though the bells have
been long removed.
Clapboard churches that once stood in rural
areas across America, particularly in the
South, but that have since been abandoned
or destroyed, have been said to come to
life with this strange phenomenon every
Christmas Eve.
One story comes to us from the edges of
the Chickamauga battlefield in Tennessee
where, according to legend, there once stood
a small, unadorned building on a farm that
came to be used for worship by the Confederate
troops garrisoned nearby. A makeshift bell
was donated for use by the farm’s
owners and was hung with pride on a makeshift
frame outside the building. Its clear ringing
would summon the faithful to worship. But
as the days grew darker and defeat drew
near, very often the bell would toll in
mourning for the loss of a soldier or other
local.
After the Union defeat of the Confederates
in September 1863, the church was abandoned.
In time, after the surrender of the South,
the little townships around Chickamauga
returned to a semblance of normalcy. The
family that farmed those lands in the days
before the war now had considerably less
land to farm, though this did not trouble
them. Too many times the plow or the hoe
would turn up more than soil in the green
fields of the South.
One frosty, clear Christmas Eve night, after
all the family festivities were over and
the house stood still and silent, there
came a sound heard only by the eldest daughter
who sat up in bed at the strangeness of
it: a bell, ringing in the cold night. Curious,
the girl got out of bed, shivering slightly
as she pulled on her dressing gown and shoes.
She tip-toed gingerly through the gravely
silent house where her family lay slumbering
and quietly opened the front door. Now there
was no doubt: the bell was ringing clearly
in the night.
Thinking there was some service called the
somehow her family had overlooked, the girl
followed the sound of the distant bell and
came at last upon the ramshackle remains
of the old Confederate church. But to her
surprise, the once blank and dark windows
were aglow with the feeble light of candles;
shapes moved to and fro and the door stood
ajar, casting a beam of yellow light onto
the snow covered ground.
As she approached, still hearing the ringing
of the bell, now nearer though she could
not see it, she became aware of a low humming,
as if people inside were humming a hymn.
She crept stealthily to the opening in the
door and held her breath. She peered inside.
What met her eyes was a scene so shocking
and otherworldly that she scarce could contain
her gasp of shock. In a strange glow that
came from neither candle nor lantern she
saw, seated row upon row, the shapes of
ghostly soldiers – some in states
of decay, others mere grinning skeletons
in ragged clothing – assembled there
for a Christmas service scheduled by some
ghoul of supernatural world. And before
them, standing with a shredded bible in
his hands, was the parson – and this
the farmer’s daughter knew for certain,
for he had come home from the battlefields
in a wooden box, having done his good offices
even to his own death.
Defying all the laws of the natural world,
called together in the spirit of the season,
these remnant ghosts had come from indignant
ends in forgotten hollows, from shallow
graves near abandoned and unused roads,
and from mass burials across the fields
of Tennessee, to keep faith together and
celebrate the season of light in the dead
of winter. They had heard the clarion call.
The farmer’s daughter, it is said,
was found wandering the snowy woodlands
as Christmas morning dawned, entirely insane
and babbling about the ringing of the Christmas
bells.
THE CHRISTMAS FETISH
Many people might cast a vote for the baby
in the manger or the angel singing “Gloria!”
as the most likely candidates for a Christmas
fetish, but there is one object that really
wins the vote hands down: the Nutcracker
Doll.
Functionally and decorative “nutbiters”
were produced in Germany and Europe as early
as the 14th century but really emerged as
an art form in the 15th and 16th century.
During this time, the modest rural appliance
invented to separate the shell of a nut
from its meat, began to take on magnificent
proportions, richly carved and embellished.
The Brothers Grimm first mention the device
by the familiar “nutcracker”
name while compiling their anthology of
fairy tales and folk sayings of the Bavarian
peoples in the 1830’s. The nutcrackers
were often cleverly carved or designed to
represent prominent townspeople such as
kings, burgomasters, and noble men and women.
These objects quickly grew in popularity
among folk art collectors of the day.
It wasn’t until a generation later
that the humble Bohemian “nutbiter”
would become forever associated with Christmas
– the perfect fetish of the season.
The Christmas Nutcracker Doll began its
life in 1816 in a play entitled “The
Nutcracker and the Mouse King” written
by German writer E.T.A. Hoffman, the tale
of an unhappy girl named Marie whose only
love was a nutcracker doll.
In 1845 famed French novelist Aleandre Dumas
adapted the play into a story more suitable
for children and, in 1891, this happier
version of the story was chosen as the basis
of a Russian ballet scored by the illustrious
Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. The ballet opened
in St. Petersburg on December 17, 1892.
The ballet tells the tale of a girl named
Clara who is given a nutcracker doll for
Christmas by her mysterious godfather, Drosselmaier.
That night, Clara falls asleep and is disturbed
by an attacking army of mice led by the
Mouse King who wants to take Clara away
to his kingdom forever. She is rescued by
soldiers of the Nutcracker who, having become
a prince, takes her to his own kingdom,
a land full of sugarplums, snowflakes and
dancing flowers. She awakens the next morning
with only the doll and memories of her Christmas
dreams.
Though popular in Russia, the Nutcracker
ballet was not staged outside of that country
until 1934 when a production was mounted
in London. Since then numerous versions
have appeared with American choreographer
George Balanchine’s 1954 production
arguably the most successful. Since reaching
popularity in America in the 1950’s
the ballet is probably the world’s
most popular ballet and is especially loved
at the holiday season.
Not as popular, however, are other, darker
endings of the Nutcracker tale in which
the original Maria (or the reinvented Clara)
is actually the prize in the battle between
the Mouse King and the Nutcracker Prince.
The Nutcracker, having won, takes his prize
to live with him forever. Maria (or Clara)
awakes to find not delightful memories of
sugarplum dreams and snowflakes, but the
reality of being trapped forever in a doll
house castle, ruling a kingdom of toys,
her wooden captor ever at her side, while
her family seeks for her in vain.
