The Christmas season, not Hallowe'en, was once considered the spookiest time of year

Have you ever listened closely to the lyrics of It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year? One line in particular might surprise you:

There'll be scary ghost stories
And tales of the glories of
Christmases long, long ago.

Written in 1962, the seasonal standard refers to what was by then already a fading custom: spending Christmas evenings regaling friends and relations with the most spine-chilling stories you could muster.

We may have relegated our celebrations of all things sinister to the end of October, but for centuries the English considered Christmas, not Hallowe'en, the best time of year to enjoy tales of the supernatural.

 It's no coincidence that the most famous Yuletide yarn of all time, A Christmas Carol, is also a ghost story.

Dickens' 1843 novella was part of a long tradition of spooky winter storytelling. In Christopher Marlowe's play The Jew of Malta, first performed in 1590, the main character, Barabas, says to himself: "Now I remember those old women's words, / Who in my wealth would tell me winter's tales, / And speak of spirits and ghosts that glide by night."

Twenty years later, in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, Queen Hermione asks her son to tell her a story, and he replies: "A sad tale's best for winter: I have one / Of sprites and goblins." A "winter tale" was in fact a byword for a spooky story.

During the medieval and Renaissance periods, ghostly tales were probably told throughout the Christmas season, from sundown on Christmas Eve to Twelfth Night.

For centuries, those 12 days were a mandatory holiday in England, giving all social classes a degree of leisure unthinkable at any other time of year. Daytime feasting and frolicking would often end with hearthside tales of hauntings and apparitions.

In the Victoria era, perhaps inspired by Dickens' narrative, Christmas Eve became the prime time for sharing ghost stories and the night of Dec. 24 a popular setting for supernatural fiction.

Henry James' famous 1898 gothic novella The Turn of the Screw, for instance, opens on a Christmas Eve gathering where celebrants are swapping ghost stories. The main narrative of the book is a story-within-a-story told by one of the partygoers.

• Read more social history and analysis by Ainsley Hawthorn

How did Christmas, of all times, become so closely associated with horror?

Humourist Jerome K. Jerome, writing in 1891, quipped that the holiday "is a genial, festive season, and we love to muse upon graves, and dead bodies, and murders, and blood."

This contrast between merrymaking and morbid curiosity might have been part of what made ghost stories appealing: a taste of bitterness to temper a holiday that is otherwise syrupy-sweet.

A time for family … living and otherwise

Folklorist and historian Francis Young has also theorized that the family focus of many Christmas festivities might naturally have turned people's thoughts to the departed.

"On a basic level," Young says, "we all know that grief for our loved ones is heightened at Christmastime simply because it's that time of year when families are reunited …The dead are especially present because we miss their participation in our conviviality."

But the most important factor was likely the bleakness and the blackness of December.

On Dec. 21 or Dec. 22, at the winter solstice, the northern hemisphere is plunged into its deepest darkness. The days are short, the nights long. The earth lies fallow and still.

How could conditions so inhospitable to human life fail to rend the fabric between this world and the next, allowing the dead to quit their graves and walk the earth?

The impulse was probably much the same as the one that drives us to tell scary stories around a campfire. Enveloped in a protective circle of warmth and light, we can safely speculate about the unknown threats that lie beyond it.

The joyful days of Christmas offered the perfect opportunity to flirt with the darkness even while driving it back.

Are you interested in trying out a few festive ghost stories for yourself in this latter half of the Christmas season?

Light a fire or a candle, hold your loved ones close, and read a few of these classics out loud:

• The Old Nurse's Story by Elizabeth Gaskell (1852)

• A Strange Christmas Game by Charlotte (J.H.) Riddell (1863)

• Oh, Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad by M.R. James (1904)

• The Kit-Bag by Algernon Blackwood (1908)

• Between the Lights by E.F. Benson (1912)

• Smee by A.M. Burrage (1931)

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