(NewsNation) — It just may be the spookiest time of the year — though more associated with Halloween, sharing scary ghost stories is also within the Christmas spirit.
Spooky storytelling during the winter is a hallowed tradition. According to Smithsonian Magazine, it stretches back centuries when families would fill winter nights with tales of spooks and monsters.
The tradition, based on folklore and the supernatural, was frowned upon by the Puritans, so it never gained much traction in America, yet the stories were once a Christmas staple in Victorian England.
Though “scary ghost stories and tales of the glories” still seem out of place in present-day American holiday celebrations, this tradition dates to Christmas celebrations in pre-Christian times, and some believe that the tradition pre-dates Christmas itself.
During the winter solstice, sitting around fires built to ward off the darkness with the Yule Log was a tradition. The Yule Log and the Yule season are often linked to pre-Christain solstice celebrations in pagan traditions.
The reaction to hearing a ghost story around the fire became a tradition, filled with warmth and group bonding at the coldest and darkest time of the year.
The tradition lasted for hundreds of years until Puritans stopped Christmas celebrations, according to the Carnegie Museum, though many traditions were revived during the Restoration (1660 to around 1688). Many Christmas traditions were seen as old-fashioned during the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution.
However, Charles Dickens created a small resurgence of the Christmas spirit with publications that weren’t just winter-themed but explicitly linked to Christmas, helping forge a bond between the holiday and ghost stories.
He popularized the notion of telling ghost stories on Christmas Eve with the publican of “A Christmas Carol” in 1843. According to the Carnegie Museum, the story helped reinvigorate traditions focusing on the more humanistic aspects of the holiday — global peace and forgiveness and goodwill towards humanity through good works.
Dickens also edited Christmas issues of magazines: “Household Words” and, after 1859, “All the Year Round,” which regularly included ghost stories.
Additionally, Dickens published “The Chimes and The Haunted Man,” which also features an unhappy man who changes his way after being visited by a ghost. In “The Seven Poor Travellers,” published in 1854, he claimed Christmas Eve is the “witching time for Story-telling,” according to Smithsonian Magazine.
Other than Dickens’ publications, in “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” first recorded by Andy Williams in 1963, the song lists “scary ghost stories” as one of the highlights of the holiday season.
While it’s unclear why the songwriters included the tradition, Sara Cleto, a folklorist specializing in British literature, told the History Channel the lyric may reference Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.”
“It’s only the one text,” she said, “but it’s such a big deal here in the U.S. and the U.K., and is pretty much all that Americans know about Christmas ghost stories in isolation.”