Request to restore the Christmas tradition of telling ghost stories

In the past 100 years, Americans kept ghosts in their own places until June 5438+00, which is our only truly haunted holiday, Halloween. But this is not always the case. It is no coincidence that the most famous ghost story is a Christmas story, or in other words, the most famous Christmas story is a ghost story. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens was first published in 1843. It tells the story of a man tortured by a series of ghosts on Christmas Eve. It belongs to a once rich but now mostly forgotten tradition, that is, telling ghost stories on Christmas Eve. Dickens' supernatural Christmas terror is not uncommon, because this festival was indisputably associated with ghosts and ghosts for most of the19th century.

Humor writer Jerome K.Jerome wrote in his collection 189 1 that every time five or six English speakers meet by the campfire on Christmas Eve, they start telling each other ghost stories and tell them after dinner. "On Christmas Eve, nothing can satisfy us except hearing true anecdotes about ghosts from each other. This is a kind and festive season, and we like to meditate on graves, bodies, murders and blood.

It is a sacred tradition to tell ghost stories in winter. A folk custom can be traced back hundreds of years ago, when every household would tell ghost stories and monster stories in winter nights. "Sad stories are most suitable for winter," Ma Milius wrote in Shakespeare's Winter Stories. "I have one. In christopher marlowe's plays, the Jewish muse who once mentioned Malta's name said, "Now I remember the words of those old women. They will tell me winter stories in My Wealth and ghost stories at night. "

Based on folklore and supernatural phenomena, this is a tradition that Puritans don't like, so it has not been very attractive in the United States. Washington irving helped revive some forgotten Christmas traditions in the early19th century, but Dickens made the concept of ghost stories popular on Christmas Eve. The Christmas magazine Household (after 1859) edited by him regularly publishes ghost stories all the year round, including not only Christmas carols, but also works such as Bells and Ghosts. These two magazines also published a story about an unfortunate man who changed his lifestyle after being visited by ghosts. Dickens' publications not only focus on winter, but also have a clear connection with Christmas, which helps to establish a connection between festivals and ghost stories. In "Seven Poor Travelers" (1854), he claimed that Christmas Eve was a "witchcraft age of storytelling".

Dickens stopped publishing Christmas publications in 1868, complaining to his friend Charles Fitch that he felt "as if I murdered a Christmas number a few years ago (maybe I killed it! By that time, however, the ghost of the Christmas ghost story has already had its own afterlife, and other writers have filled the gap left by Dickens. When Jerome spoke at 189 1 after dinner, he could make fun of a long-standing tradition of Victorian culture at will.

If these later ghost stories did not enter the Christmas canon like Dickens' works, there may be a reason. As William Dean Howells lamented in an editorial in Harper 1886, the tradition of Christmas ghost is gradually losing Dickens' emotional morality: "The ethical intention of giving Dickens the dignity of his early Christmas stories has almost completely disappeared."

Readers can pause their Christmas stories, don't believe in supernatural forces, and believe that such terror will make people like Scrooge better overnight, which is more difficult. "People always know that in a series of scenes, a dream can't change a person's character; A ghost can't change an overly selfish person; A life can't turn white overnight like hair, but the most meaningful illusion. Gradually, they no longer believe that these devices and appliances have virtues.

Dickens' genius lies in combining Goth with sentimentality and reaffirming basic bourgeois values with ghost stories. However, with the development of tradition, other writers are less rigid about this social view and prefer simple horror. In Henry James' famous Gothic novella turn of the screw, the frame story is a ghost story of a group of people sitting around the fire telling Christmas Eve, which leads to a pure horror story. At the same time, the tradition of ghosts at Christmas began to become rigid, and there was no excuse for charity or sentimentality.

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Without the mental burden that initially promoted its popularity, a new tradition is being introduced from the other side of the Atlantic, accompanied by a huge wave of immigrants from Scotland and Ireland to the United States: Halloween.

We now know that this festival is a strange mixture of Celtic and Catholic traditions. It largely draws lessons from the ancient pagan festival Saman Festival to celebrate the end of the harvest season and the beginning of winter. Like many other pagan festivals, the festival of Sahain merged with the Catholic Festival of All Souls in time. This festival may also be a little obsessed with the dead, entering Halloween. At this time, the deceased was revered, and the boundary between this life and the afterlife was the thinnest. When ghosts and goblins ruled the night, Scottish and Irish immigrants brought it to America.

Halloween did not immediately replace Christmas as the most important festival for ghosts, partly because it has been a Scottish festival for decades. Scottish immigrants (and, to a lesser extent, Irish immigrants) tried to separate Halloween from its ghostly meaning and connect it with Scottish traditions, but failed, as Nicholas Rogers pointed out in his Halloween: from pagan ceremonies to party night: "In fact, there are many efforts to rebuild Halloween as a polite national celebration day. The Caledonian Society of Canada and other organizations celebrate Halloween with Scottish dance, music and Robbie Burns's poems, while in new york, the Gaelic Society celebrates Halloween with "Irish Poetry and Music Night".

Americans long for Halloween. However, ghosts and nightmares exceed their desire for Irish and Scottish culture. Americans have grasped the supernatural factors of Halloween, not the cultural factors. Now we all know how this happened.

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The transition from Christmas to Halloween, because Halloween, the most important festival, is an unbalanced transition. Even in 19 15, the annual Christmas special issue of this magazine is still dominated by ghost stories, and the Indoor and Outdoor Game Manual published by Florence kingsland in 1904 still lists ghost stories as the delicacies of Christmas celebrations: "People always think that at Christmas, the kingdom of ghosts and gods is more than ever.

For decades, these two winter celebrations have ended. At that time, ghosts were in the air, and we kept the dead close to us. My own family has been inviting friends to tell ghost stories around the festival for years. It doesn't matter that we use real or fictional stories instead of gifts. People will inevitably feel shy at first, but once the story begins to spread, everyone will soon gain something. This is a refreshing choice, not the merry Christmas and kindness that are often forced; Revive the traditional ghost story of death as another way to celebrate Christmas.

In his Harper's Editorial, howells lamented the loss of Dickens' Ghost Story. With nostalgia for the return of horror stories, he had a firm moral principle:

"Once a year, if not often, use fables to remind people of ancient and simple truths; Teach them to forgive, learn charity, learn to work hard for life, and live better and purer than others. Only by following these principles can the world unite and advance together. This is a very good and elegant barbarian, who keeps you and the sufferings around him in his heart and is taught. As Dickens has always taught, some emotions of elegance and humanity, such as gentleness, self-sacrifice and generosity to the sick and helpless, self-esteem, masculinity and femininity, are the heritage of mankind, a direct gift from God, and equality between the rich and the poor. "

The night is getting deeper and deeper, and we are heading for the new year with anxiety and hope. Is there a better messenger than the dead to convey such a message?

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