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Contributed to The Yorker’s Christmas Advent Calendar by the Culture section.
Twas the night before Christmas, when all round the house, not a creature was stirring…
Whirling snow slams against the window panes, a fire blazes in the grate, and a book lies, unwrapped, in the palm of your hand. Cracking open its cover open will reveal thrilling tales of snow and ice, of adventure, fantasy, and faraway lands. Christmas has a unique association with storytelling. Shut up in the luxury of your home, however, it’s easy to forget just how dark and twisted some seasonal literature is.
Christmas stories feature some of the best literary villains, their depravity made even more extreme by the merriness of the season. But winter is the hardest time of year; a savage season in which one year dies to make way for the next.
Light leaks into the streets from doorways and windows, whilst tinselly houses glow with colour. Decked with holly wreathes, doors shut out the outsiders and unfortunates; those without families and fat shiny presents to unwrap. Outside, it’s a different story. Fictional characters shudder in the fog-throttled streets, the cold freezing the crystals of their breath. Written all over with poverty, they cling to life with their fingertips.
A Little Princess’s Sara Crewe stares, fainting with hunger, through the windows of the rich family home from her close-walled attic. Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Match Girl is a simple story, and brutally short. Out in the cold, a little girl with bare feet stumbles through the streets, striking the last of her matches. The morning after, her small body will be found frozen to death.
The Fir Tree, written by the same author, is another sad sliver of a story. Told with economy, these tales are about deprivation as much as they are possession, miserness as much as generosity, and misery as much as happiness.
An account of Christmas tales wouldn’t be complete without Charles Dickens, author of five Christmas books and many more short stories. Haunted by chain-rattling ghosts and strange goblins, his tales grapple with supernatural, alongside rather more human, horrors. In A Christmas Carol, fog has London by the throat. Dickens’s The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain and The Chimes also rattled his readers. And try M R James’s ghost stories, many of which were written for Christmas Eve to terrifying effect.
Published 13 years ago, Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black begins on Christmas Eve. A family uphold an ancient tradition of seasonal storytelling by the flames of a huge fire. They tell of ‘dripping stone walls in uninhabited castles and of ivy-clad monastery ruins by moonlight, of locked inner rooms and secret dungeons, dank charnel houses and overgrown graveyards, of footsteps creaking upon staircases and fingers tapping at casements, of howlings and shriekings, groanings and scuttlings and the clanking of chains, or hooded monks and headless horsemen ...’ The sentence hurtles dizzyingly on, crammed to the hilt with horror.
The Woman in Black rests on the premise that everybody has a ghost story in them. Arthur Kipps does. But his is the most terrifying, and real, of them all. Digging into the mundane affairs of a lonely old woman, he finds himself stumbling into something rather more sinister. Curiously, when he asks questions, people fall silent, turn away, stop dead. And then there’s that third person at the back of Mrs Drablow’s funeral; a figure with skin stretched whitely over its bones, but dressed in the deepest black. This is a vividly told little story; one that breathes down your neck. Hill’s language touches everything with deathliness, and her words have a pallor of their own. The hands of the narrative reach forwards and backwards through time, further cranking up the horror.
There are snowy lands and strange creatures through the back of the wardrobe in C.S. Lewis’s Narnia. But it’s a world held in the icy fist of the White Witch; a world in which it is endlessly winter, but never Christmas. But, through the adventures of the Pevensie siblings, the witch’s reign will finally thaw. Against the odds, Sarah Crewe is rescued. Tiny Tim lives to see the New Year in. And Arthur Kipps exorcises his ghost story. Light and dark, Christmas tales are compulsive, spellbinding reading.
For yesterday's Advent Calendar article, click here.
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