The holiday season is a time for tradition. Folks have yearly rituals of cozying up to watch a festive movie or baking cookies in a messy kitchen. Acclaimed cartoonist Seth exposes a spooky tradition that is as old as it is bizarre in his latest series of illustrated classics.
Popular in Victorian-era England, ghost stories were published in December and often read together by families around the fire to compliment the cold, dark nights. To help revive the 18th-century tradition, Seth has illustrated three short Victorian-era ghost stories every year since 2015, which are reprinted and published with the help of Windsor-based bookshop Biblioasis.
This year’s collection featured three bone-chilling works: A Visit by Shirley Jackson, The Corner Shop by Lady Asquith and The Dead and the Countess by Gertrude Atherton.
These tales of eerie estates, unusual antiques and undead elites sound more appropriate for Halloween than for holiday reading material. However, these are not the only scary stories being told in the winter months.
Though irregular, the holiday season has a few connections to scary motifs through tales that are well-known and re-told each year. These include the German folklore of the anti-Santa known as Krampus and Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.
There is no concrete relation between the ghost story genre and the holidays beyond tradition. However, this collection of Christmas ghost stories showcases the absurdity of holiday customs. If some people decorate pine trees and bake cookies shaped like people, is it that odd to read ghost stories in the same traditional fashion?
Tradition takes on many forms and reading these stories reminded me of my family’s strange holiday traditions. We always disregard school and all responsibilities to go shopping on Black Friday, then eat delicious, ready-made, frozen meals on Christmas Eve. Even though we don’t celebrate the holidays with ghost tales, it felt nostalgic to immerse myself in a ritual as peculiar as my own family’s.
The books are quite small, ranging from 50 to 80 pages. The short length of the stories means they can be read in one sitting—perfect for right before bed, if they don’t keep you awake. While the speed and ease of reading was a treat, it would have been nice if these classic stories had been adapted for a modern North American audience. For example, the creepy atmosphere the books were trying to establish shatters when the story is disrupted for a Google search of what a “pale waistcoat” actually means.
The cover and illustrations, done by Seth himself, help modernize these stories for the 21st century. His illustrations are bold yet simple, and the use of shadows brings a lifelike quality to the playful cartoon style. Seth visually guides readers through each scene and adds thrill to every tale, providing further context to the books’ ghostly settings such as a Victorian graveyard and a creepy corner shop.
This book collection kept me up at night with its chilling tales and gave me a chance to reflect on what tradition means during the holiday season. Those looking to introduce a weird yet interesting tradition with spooky historical ties should consider reading Christmas ghost stories to haunt the holiday season.
The writer received press copies of the books to review.
Featured image by Justin Ball.
