Scary Ghost Stories: Tales of Christmases Long, Long Ago

There is one line in one very famous Christmas song that everybody sings and nobody thinks about.It comes in near the end. It goes by in about two seconds, tucked between the caroling and the marshmallow toasting, and for one half of one bar it tells you something that almost every American has forgotten: that Christmas used to be the season for being frightened.It was. For centuries. Dickens wrote five of them, not one. M. R. James read a new one aloud by candlelight every Christmas Eve for thirty years. Henry James set his most famous ghost story at a Christmas house party, around a fire, with the guests demanding to be scared. Then the holiday became a children's party, the custom quietly died on this side of the Atlantic, and all that survived of it was that one line in that one song.This book is what that line was pointing at.Eleven stories, built on winter folklore that people actually kept, in most cases for centuries, and in several cases are still keeping.A boy in Iceland in 1974 who is too embarrassed to wear the ugly hat his grandmother sat up all night making, on the one night of the year when you do not go outside without something new on.A family in Wales who open the door to a horse's skull on a pole and do not understand that they are being asked a question.A town plow driver on Christmas Eve who clears a road for eleven miles past the point where the road ends, and finds forty people out shoveling who are glad to see him.A menorah in a window in Ohio in 1938, and the man who sat beside it for eight nights, and who is still sitting there forty-one years later.A chair pulled up in front of a cold woodstove, facing it, in a house where nobody brought a chair in.These are stories about rules. Leave the bowl out. Stay awake with the fire. Wear something new. Don't go out to the barn at midnight. Don't count. Every one of them is real, every one of them was kept by people who were not superstitious about anything else, and every one of them was made because somebody, at some point, found out what happens.A source note at the back explains where each one came from, which is the part that will keep you up.A gift book for the person who has read everything. Set it out with the decorations. Read one a night through December. Give it to whoever in your family tells the stories.From the author of ANYONE'S GHOST: Six Stories with Ghosts in Them.