It is Christmas and of course I am still thinking about ghosts.

This time of year is full of memory. We return to the same songs, the same films, the same small rituals, often without thinking about it. Decorations come out of boxes they’ve lived in for years. Stories get retold. Old habits resurface. For a few days, it can feel as though time loosens its grip and the past slips quietly into the present.

Christmas is also when absence is felt most sharply. Empty chairs stand out. Familiar names are spoken more often. People who are no longer here can feel unexpectedly close, not in a dramatic way, but in the background of things. A thought. A memory. A feeling that arrives without warning.

I think that’s why ghost stories feel so right at this time of year. They give shape to feelings that are hard to put into words. They offer a way of sitting with memory, rather than pushing it away. Christmas sits slightly outside normal life. Work slows down. Routines fall away. Days blur into one another. Ghosts belong to that same in-between space, caught between what was and what is. When everything else feels paused, ghost stories feel closer somehow.

Despite the lights and celebrations, this season often carries a mix of emotions. There’s warmth, of course, but also nostalgia, sadness, and longing. Ghost stories don’t clash with that mood. They move at the same pace. On screen, Christmas hauntings are at their best when they are quiet. The ghosts don’t burst in. They drift back. They linger. They remind. What stays with us isn’t just the idea of a ghost, but the way memory itself behaves, turning up when we least expect it.

The most famous Christmas ghost story is really about this collision with memory. A Christmas Carol is often framed as a tale of bitterness cured by kindness, but that reading misses something important. Scrooge isn’t simply cruel or miserly. He’s someone who has learned to protect himself by shutting the world out. His ghosts don’t just scare him into change; they force him to look at his past, at the losses he’s buried, at the moments where grief hardened into isolation. Healing only begins when he’s willing to remember, to feel, and to reconnect with what he’s lost.

This is why these stories can feel comforting in December. They don’t promise neat endings or easy answers, but they do offer recognition. They remind us that to be haunted often means to have loved, and that memory, however painful, is also a way of staying connected.

At a time so focused on togetherness, ghost stories make room for those who are missing. They don’t try to fix absence or tidy it away. They just let it exist. And in doing so, they suggest that haunting isn’t always a threat. A Christmas haunting is proof that something really mattered.