A Patreon patron has sent in a question for me: “What did Lovecraft write or say about Christmas? There’s the short story “The Festival,” of course. Anything else? Did he ever comment on a connection between Christmas and ghosts, beyond the observation that M.R. James read many of his tales to the boys at Eton at Christmastime?”
H.P. Lovecraft grew up with a traditional enjoyment of Christmas as a homely event. The trimming of the home with holly and evergreen boughs. Carol-singing in the parlour on Christmas Eve. The garlanded and lit star-topped Christmas tree, with a glittering drift of parcelled gifts and purling ribbons spread beneath it. The “old-time Christmas feast with plum pudding and all” and mince pies too. His ideal festive meal (here actually Thanksgiving, but very similar) being…
Enchanted soup — apotheosised roast turkey with dressing of chestnuts & all the rare spices & savoury herbs that camel-caravans with tinkling bells bring secretly from forgotten orients of eternal spring across the deserts beyond the Oxus — cauliflower with cryptical creaming — cranberry sauce with the soul of Rhode Island bogs in it — salads that emperors have dreamed into reality — sweet potatoes with visions of pillar’d Virginia plantation-houses — gravy for which Apicius strove & Lucullus sigh’d in vain — plum pudding such as Irving never tasted at Bracebridge Hall — & to crown the feast, a gorgeous mince pie fairly articulate with memories of New-England fireplaces & cold-cellars. All the glory of earth sublimated in one transcendent repast — one divides one’s life into periods of before & after having consumed — or even smelled or dream’d of — such a meal!
We can better judge his early regard for Christmas by his poetry rather than his fiction (of which only “The Festival” makes use of “the Yule-time”). For instance, the very long poem “Old Christmas” (written late 1917). S.T. Joshi sums it up as…
a re-creation of a typical Christmas night in the England of Queen Anne’s time [with] its resolutely wholesome and cheerful couplets. The sheer geniality of the poem eventually wins one over if one can endure the antiquated diction.
It reads better for a British reader, perhaps, and seems fine to me. Lovecraft himself called it “a rhymed essay — light verse, verging on the whimsical”. Lovecraft was pleased to find that his poem had successfully evoked an olde English winter coach-road topography… “I rejoice that Mr. Bullen, a native of the Mother Land, should find my pictures reasonably accurate.” The poem’s title likely points us to Washington Irving’s “Old Christmas” (1820) which has a very similar British setting and set of concerns, and which itself followed on from Scott’s Marmion (1808).
Lovecraft was also aware of the deeper Roman and pre-historical roots of Christmas, as evidenced in his local newspaper astronomy article “The December Sky” of 1914. There he talks of the winter solstice date and that the Christian festival was likely partly a 4th century absorption of “the ancient Roman Saturnalia, which was [itself] a development of the primitive [Italian] winter festival called Brumalia.” Of the Northern pagan customs, equally intertwined into the Christmas festivities, he notes in the same article that… “Many of our present Yuletide customs are derived from the winter festivals of the Druids and of our Saxon ancestors.” Here he was likely thinking of things like the Yule log and the red-berried evergreen holly.
For Lovecraft Christmas and New Year was usually a time for some sustained personal writing, beginning with some personal poems to ‘limber up’. Lovecraft penned and sent witty and personally-tailored “Yuletide” verses to his friends and sometimes also to their cats. For instance, in mid December 1925 his friend Sechrist received a verse that began… “May Polynesian skies thy Yuletide bless”. Sechrist had spent many years as a missionary on the islands. A great many more of these verses are to be found in the latest edition of The Ancient Track: The Complete Poetical Works of H. P. Lovecraft.
It should go without saying that Lovecraft, as an atheist, enjoyed Christmas as a festive tradition and not as a religious festival. Though he was not above wishing people like Derleth, Sechrist and the Rev. Whitehead a straight “Merry Christmas” in letters (rather than his usual use of “Yuletide”). He also sent plain Christmas cards, almost cursory in this instance, to his less favoured correspondents…
In his later years he could also stretch to hearing (but perhaps not singing) Christmas carols sung in the courtyard of the local Handicraft Club in College Street. He also found enjoyment in “decking the halls” and setting up a Christmas tree to surprise his surviving aunt, and in then accompanying her to the adjacent Paxton guest-house to enjoy a Christmas dinner with the old folks.
What of ghost stories? While admiring Victorian idealism and spread of manners Lovecraft disliked nearly all other aspects of mid-Victorian culture and architecture, and especially its sentimental “mind bred on Dickens”. He writes… “I have my pet detestations amongst the later English [authors, with the first of these being] “the sentimental hypocrite Charles Dickens” whose works made him “nauseatedly weary”. It then follows that this dislike may have extended to the maudlin and political Dickensian accretions on Christmas (Scrooge, Tiny Tim, etc), together with the British tradition of the ‘ghost story told at Christmas’. The latter first emerged in the late 1820s in the north of England, though we only have one unreliable source for that. Possibly the reception of Washington Irving’s “Old Christmas” (1820) helped spur such things, since at one point it notes an old antiquarian Parson “dealing forth strange accounts of popular superstitions and legends of the surrounding country” by the fireside. But the ‘Christmas ghost story’ as such first emerged in print in the 1830s, from the prolific pen of Dickens. By the 1860s a genteel ghost story was a commonplace in the Christmas annuals, but it is said to have mostly faded away by the start of the First World War in Europe. As an oral read-out-loud tradition it has now also largely faded away in the home — being now only a seasonal stock-in-trade reached for by weary magazine editors and TV programmers. The greatest British tradition may well be ‘the invention of tradition’, but such invention does not always stand the test of time.
What of America? So far as I know ghost stories were not told at Christmas in Rhode Island in Lovecraft’s youth. The Puritans had of course frowned on such things, to the extent that printed early Victorian accounts of a British Christmastime had to be peppered with footnotes to explain our curious doings and festive frolics to Americans. But it is not impossible that families of British origin continued the Dickensian tradition into the period of Lovecraft’s boyhood, the 1900s, via British magazines. If they did then it could not have been with ghost tales from M.R. James, who from circa 1904 onward was telling an annual self-penned ghost story to the boys at Eton, since Lovecraft did not even discover M.R. James until “mid-December 1925” (Joshi, I Am Providence). Nor, so far as I can tell, was there a wider American tradition of Christmas oral readings of ghost stories by other more local writers, though some pre-1914 Christmas annuals in America evidently followed the British tradition of printing a sentimental moralistic Christmas ghost story among the festive fare — and there is the possibly-isolated example of the famous “The Turn of the Screw” (1898) with its Christmas framing. Lovecraft’s grandfather also told him oral weird tales, but so far as I recall this was not done as a Christmas tradition.
However, Lovecraft’s long “Old Christmas” poem of 1917 does very briefly depict a “Granny Goodwife” telling small children a ghost tale on Christmas Eve in the pre-Victorian reign of Queen Anne, so evidently he knew of the British tradition and believed that it went back beyond Dickens and the 1830s. Possibly he had read Hervey’s Book of Christmas (1838), a book deeply unconvincing on the supposed antiquity of the ghost-story “tradition”, but which does have an evocative drawing of just such a “Granny Goodwife” and her little charges. Hervey would have us believe this is good evidence of ghost storytelling at Christmastime, and he leans on it heavily…
But note that there is nothing in the picture to suggest this depicts Christmas rather than Halloween, or the general telling of “winter tales” of the sort evoked by the British playwright Marlowe, who in a play of 1589 had a Maltese character recall these from childhood…
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
About the place where treasure hath been hid.
That there were undoubtedly supernatural fireside tales told during long winter nights does not, however, mean that some about ghosts were traditionally recounted on Christmas Eve. “Winter” here could equally imply Halloween or post-Christmas.
My feeling is that ‘the Christmas ghost tale’ as we know it was a confabulation that first arose organically in the 1820s, perhaps in local English responses to Scott’s best-selling Marmion (1808) and the visiting American Washington Irving (1820), and this trend in grassroots re-creation was then picked up and promoted commercially by Dickens and Hervey in the 1830s.
But ironically Lovecraft was right in his poem of “Old Christmas”… in a way. There was once some sort of Christmas tradition in Britain, but it had almost certainly long been broken by the 1820s. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (c. 1377) is clear evidence that a supernatural ‘Christmas-set tale’ could have had a hearing at Christmas in the northern Midlands, but the poem was lost and was not recovered in good form until 1864. Another such ‘lost’ tale is the first horror novel Beware the Cat (1561), first published in accessible form by the Chetham Society in Remains, Historical & Literary (1860). The narrator tells his cycle of tales of talking cats to his bedfellows on a chilly Christmas night.
