It is de rigeur among horror hounds to make a big production out of how much you dislike Christmas. And if you do partake in the season’s festivities – as, after all, most of us do – then you must do so as ironically as possible. Hence things like the exhausting fake discourses about whether or not Die Hard is a Christmas movie or the endless and equally exhausting “you’ve heard of elf on a shelf” gags.

And I get it. Christmas, as it exists today, is basically a post-consumer hellscape, and Christian extremists have turned something as impossibly bland as saying “happy holidays” into a battleground over the most entitled bullshit you can possibly imagine. Meanwhile, “first to market” means that Christmas shit fills up the stores earlier and earlier each year. There’s a lot to hate.

But I actually sort of love Christmas, even though I don’t care for compulsory gift-giving or for family gatherings and I’m certainly not a Christian. (It’s cool if you are, though. I’ve got nothing against you, as long as you’re not the shitty kind I mentioned in the previous paragraph.)

While the “most wonderful time of the year” sloganeering was always meant as some whistling past the graveyard – Christmas comes near the solstice, after all, making it literally the coldest and darkest time fo the year – I actually do quite like this season. Part of that is simply that I love brightly colored lights on strings. I love any light designed to provide ambiance over illumination. And I love to see all the houses lit up against the dark that presses in.

And I love that pressing dark, if I’m honest. Night in the winter just feels darker than night any other time of year, and those pools of light with the inky shadows around them is an appealing aesthetic for someone like me.

There’s a reason, after all, why ghost stories are associated with Christmas, rather than Halloween. “It always is Christmas Eve, in a ghost story,” Jerome K. Jerome wrote back in the day, and while that may be an exaggeration, it’s one that captures a truth.

Ghost stories at Christmas are a tradition dating back at least to the Victorians and one that, for all our Krampuses and our Christmas horror movies, we’ve rather lost the thread of. Many of the best ghost stories in the business come from this tradition, particularly those of M.R. James. These don’t always take place on Christmas, but they always have a feel that captures the chill at the edge of the room, as you all gather around the fireplace and listen to someone tell a hair-raising tale.

James was far from alone, either. Charles Dickens may have penned the Christmas ghost story that we all still remember, but it was far from the only one, even in his own ouevre. Check out “The Signal-Man” for one example, which was adapted by the BBC as part of their long-running Ghost Story for Christmas series of telefilms. My favorite classic ghost story writer, E.F. Benson, also got in on the action more than once.

Even when they aren’t set around Christmastime, these chilly tales of “pleasing terror” (James’ term) are always perfect for this time of year. Keep a book of them by your bedside table and read one before bed each night in the run-up to the New Year – feel like a proper Victorian of leisure.

One unlikely place where this tradition is being kept alive is in the pages of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy comics. While it may seem odd at first glance that there are so many Hellboy stories set around Christmas, and so few around Halloween, it actually makes a lot of sense, when you look back at Mignola’s influences. For several years now, a Hellboy Winter Special has presented seasonal tales, and there are plenty of classic Hellboy stories that are perfect for the holidays.

This year, there’s also something new. I haven’t gotten a chance to read Four Gathered on Christmas Eve yet, but it comes to us from a veritable Mount Rushmore of talented cartoonists including Eric Powell, Becky Cloonan, James Harren, and Mignola himself, and it is one of the things I’ve been most eagerly looking forward to this entire year.

The ghost story season doesn’t precisely end at Christmas, either. As long as the nights stay cold and dark and long, it’ll be an ideal time to tell a shivery tale or two. In that spirit, we’ll be showing one of my favorite horror anthology films, the 1945 British classic Dead of Night, which features its own share of Christmas ghost stories, at the Stray Cat Film Center on December 28.

As always, the show is free, and afterward, Tyler and I will be hosting our usual semi-academic discussion, this time chatting about the tradition of ghost stories at Christmas and going over the fact that Dead of Night was the actual inspiration for the Steady State theory of the universe – how many horror films can claim that?

If you’re looking for suitably spooky tales to read on a dark winter’s night, I highly recommend collections by some of the greats of the ghost story, with a few of my personal favorites being M.R. James, E.F. Benson, and Robert Westall. (I wrote the introductions for the reissues of a couple of Robert Westall collections from Valancourt Books.) And if you’ve already read all those and are looking for something more modern, you probably won’t go too far wrong by picking up my latest book.

I haven’t written a lot of specifically Christmassy stories myself, but How to See Ghosts contains one of my only self-consciously Christmas-set stories, “The Humbug,” which was originally performed for Christmas at Pseudopod a couple of years ago. It is, as many of the best Christmas ghost stories are, surprisingly mean-spirited.

We all have our own particular holiday traditions – mine involve those Christmas-tree shaped mini cakes that Little Debbie puts out every year. Whatever your preferred methodology for celebrating the season, even if that is flipping it the bird until the holidays are long over, I hope you get to experience the joy of icy fingers up and down your spine at least once before the long winter comes to an end.

After all, that’s what Christmas is all about.