We Need More Ghosts at Christmas

I wrote around this time last year how Christmas sometimes obscures the wistful character of December, blocking out the midnight month with forced smiles and a panicked fealty to Hallmark’s mandate of what the season should be, that fear-stoking monstrosity of an expectation which makes us silently shout at one another that if the house isn’t spick and span and dressed to the nines, there is something quite wrong with our lives. It’s not Christmas’s fault, of course—it’s ours, us who participate in the bustle and crow about the meaning of the season and leave that meaning in the storage unit while we bust our asses to get a nice Christmas card out on time—but for as wonderful as Mariah Carey’s work is, there’s an imbalance between her and “In the Bleak Midwinter,” and not in the direction of bleakness. We hear enough about the undersides of Christmas trees. We don’t hear enough about frosty wind making moan. And—to the point I made in that post last year—we crowd out all sorts of other December music as well, “Champagne Problems” and “Lua” and “Winter Song.” We refuse to feel certain sorts of ways.

Back in Minnesota for a weekend a few weeks ago, something hit me in a defiant spot, and I ended up listening to Missy Higgins’s “Scar” for a few days straight coming out of the trip. Scar is not a December song (I’d place it best in June), but we’ll get there.

Back in South Bend for a work trip a couple days after the Minnesota flight home, I was still on Missy Higgins, and I put Scar on as I entered the Holiday Inn Express shower, and I let Spotify run its course when the song ended because my hands were soapy and the phone was on the counter and I didn’t much care.

This is how we get to the December song.

It turns out “Scar Radio” leads you to a lot of songs by Australians.

There’s a line in “The Most Wonderful Time of the Year” that sparks conversation now and then, and if you’ve listened to that song recently you might know what it is I’m referring to.

“There’ll be scary ghost stories and tales of the glories of Christmases long, long ago…”

What the heck??

Ghost stories were, we can presume, even if we don’t find some article about it from Vice or whoever, once part of Christmas. Ghost stories were once part of Christmas, back in the bleaker times, back in the acoustic times, back in the times when nights were darker and polio was prevalent and there was a pretty believable possibility that your average first-world male life might end with an infection from a bullet obtained in a war. It makes a whole lot of sense, when you think about it: Christmas occupies this space on the calendar because we’re approaching the winter solstice. December is the midnight month. We are living in a month of darkness, even if we crowd it out with the nightlights of backlit screens. What better time to talk about ghosts?

One thing about ghosts is that they’re real. Not necessarily hard-and-fast literal ghosts (I don’t know about those either way), but personal ghosts. People leave. You leave. Places change and you move on and someone is living in your old apartment now, and someone is sitting at your old desk, and the same will be true of your current apartment and your current desk soon enough, and something about going out of town or staying in town while others leave hammers that home like a nail gun in the service of United Way. “See you in 2023,” we might say. “See you after Christmas.” See you in the future, when today has become the past. Can you feel the nostalgia yet for this very afternoon? You will soon enough.

But while today will never come again and this year will never come again, they won’t really go away, either. They don’t go away, do they? Can you not still see those years in the past? Can you not still see those Christmases when you were a child, and when you were whatever else you were before you became whatever it is that you are now? Can you not hear the voice and know the face and feel the feeling that friend used to give you when you saw them exhale steam in a snowmelt foyer, 33-degree water wicking from a polyester coat what cannot have been fifteen years ago but is fifteen years ago somehow, fifteen years, a decade and then half a decade and growing larger every day?

Ghosts are real. Not necessarily hard-and-fast literal ghosts, but the personal ones. They live in our heads. They live in our hearts. And they inhabit moonlit places, streetlit places, places accented by blurry, multi-colored string lights below the neon signs, below the neon signs in the translucent windows of the old brick bars.

Here’s the song that came on in that Holiday Inn Express.