… no Christmas was complete without an orgy of ghosts and ghost stories. Nowadays, nobody seems to care about ghosts. No haunted chambers, no clanking chains, no sheeted dead, no spectral midnight hand: all gone! Christmas will never be the same again!1

Black and white image of two kookaburras in a tree. There is a full moon a lake, a building and bushland in the background.

An Australian Christmas carol, 1886; A/S13/01/86/1

Christmas Eve traditions can be shared or personal, dictated by culture, family or circumstance. You may choose to see friends on Christmas Eve so you can spend Christmas day with family, hold an annual viewing of the film, Die Hard, or you may indulge in the Icelandic tradition of giving a book as a present on Christmas Eve.2

You may celebrate a different Big Day, celebrate at a different time or not commemorate the day at all and simply appreciate some quiet time off or enjoy the penalty rates when payday comes.

In the first century or so of colonial Australia, we imported and emulated the curious British tradition of reading a ghost story on Christmas Eve. The roots of this tradition are likely to have begun with the commemoration of the beginning of winter which marks the end of abundance, as well as Samhain, the time when the dead and the living walk together.3

Following Samhain in the northern hemisphere is the midwinter solstice, bleak short days of bitter cold drawing families and communities into close quarters around a fire. Perfect conditions for spinning a scary story.

Christmas card with a Kewpie Doll holding a flag which reads "Kewpie rises from his cot and asks that you forget me not, And whispers! Tho you're far away, I think of you this Xmas day".  The card reads "Christmas Wishes". There are blue forget-me-not flowers in the background.
Christmas Wishes Kewpie rises from his cot, Atlas Press; H97.248/9

The Christmas ghost story we most remember now is A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (which you can listen to or read online with your State Library Victoria membership). Dickens wrote a number of ghost stories for Christmas, not all of them with a festive theme, and his work was part of an already longstanding tradition. 

Some of you may be familiar with the series of short and spooky tales produced by the BBC, beginning in 1971, titled A Ghost Story for Christmas.4 These broadcasts elevated the work of M R James. James was a scholar at Eton College and was known to gather his students and colleagues together around the fire and chill them with one of his haunting tales. These stories were eventually published in collections such as Ghost Stories of an Antiquary.

Photo of a paragraph from a newspaper which reads: "Is there a real Christmas in Australia - a real old Christmas of the simple, all-believing kind? Is there a Christmas of the kind that we used to read about as being an annual event in England, from anything between sayy 500 and 50 years ago? I'm sure there's not."

Detail from newspaper article, ‘At the beehive’, showing the enduring nostalgia for an English Christmas. From The Bendigo Independent, 20 December 1913 p 7

The efforts to bring European festive traditions to Australia have always garnered mixed results. The December climate is not aligned with knee rugs, cosy rooms and roasted meats. Australian newspapers did keep the tradition of the Christmas ghost story alive with annual publications of unsettling and atmospheric tales. These tales however were most often set in the cold and foggy landscapes of England or Ireland with the Australian sun deemed too strong for spectres.

A columnist credited only as An Australian Colonist noted in 1872 that although ‘our Christmas Eves… have plenty of jokes and laughter, we miss the shuddering treat of ghostly revelations.’5 Indeed it was thought at the time that the nation was too young to have the requisite history for hauntings.6

Image if man in hat and coat in gully looking up at an old house on the ridge

‘Crowther’s Christmas ghost’, Punch, 21 December 1911, p 7

Attempts were made at setting ghost stories in an Australian landscape, many of them very successful, such as the work of Edward Dyson, which was often found in newspapers and magazines in the week before Christmas. His tale Crowther’s Christmas ghost begins with our titular Crowther throwing his luggage at ‘… the perspiring rouseabout porter at Spencer Street’7 before embarking on a hot and dusty journey from Melbourne to his ramshackle hometown and the haunts of his youth. The work of writers the likes of Edward Dyson, Barbara Baynton, Guy Boothby, William Sylvester Walker and the darker sides of Henry Lawson helped to build a solid foundation for uniquely (colonial) Australian horror fiction.

Drawing of a group of children in a shop.  Children and adults are present. There are toys and balloons in the shop and two cherubs hold a banner across the top of the image that reads "Christmas 1876".
The Shilling Shop on Christmas Eve; A/S23/12/76/145

The tradition of the Christmas ghost story sadly fell away as Halloween grew in popularity, providing ghosts a month all to themselves. The attempt to keep this awfully British tradition alive in Australia offers a unique insight into the ways in which nostalgia worked to build, and perhaps hamper, a new nation finding its identity.8

An oval frame of flowers and leaves surrounds a photograph of a chile on a path.  To one side of the path is a wooden fence, to the other is a lake with reeds and large gum trees.  On the photograph is written the word "Murtoa".  Across the bottom of the card is written "Just to with you a happy chirstmas".

Murtoa, ca 1909; H90.140/1204

References

  1. Where is the Christmas ghost?’, Nagambie Times, December 25, 1914 p 20
  2. Oster, Lauren, ‘Iceland’s Christmas book flood is a force of nature’, Smithsonian Magazine, December 15, 2022
  3. Green, Miranda, 1986, The Gods of the Celts, Alan and Sutton, Gloucester, p 122
  4. Johnstone, Derek, 2015, Haunted Seasons: Television ghost stories for Christmas and Horror for Halloween, Palgrave McMillan, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, p 1
  5. Christmas in Australia’, Leisure Hour; an IIlustrated Magazine for Home Reading, London 1872 p 811
  6. Johnstone, Derek, 2015, Haunted Seasons: Television Ghost Stories for Christmas and Horror for Halloween, Palgrave Macmillan, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, p 52
  7. ‘Crowther’s Christmas ghost’, Punch, 2 December 1911, p 7
  8. The author of course acknowledges First Nations peoples as custodians of the oldest living continuous cultures in the world.

This article has 2 comments

  1. Perhaps we need a film like The Babadook to replace Die Hard, in becoming an Australian take on the frisson of Christmas horror.

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