Steven LaChance Blog

I often think of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol when I think about ghosts this time of year. December has always felt like the most haunted month to me. Not because it is frightening, but because it brings the past closer. Dickens understood that. He tapped into something deeply human when he wrapped a ghost story inside a holiday.

A Christmas Carol is Gothic and unsettling, but its power has never come from fear alone. Its images have stayed with readers for generations because they are rooted in real emotion. Grief. Regret. Anger. Loss. The quiet way the world can harden even a good heart when pain is left unattended.

Scrooge is not haunted because he is evil. He is haunted because he is wounded. The ghosts do not come to punish him. They come to show him the rooms of his own life. The moments where love once lived. The doors he closed to survive. The future that grows cold when compassion disappears.

I think that is why ghost stories feel right in December. The season already asks us to remember. Old traditions return. Familiar rooms are used the same way they were years ago. Memory does its work quietly, and sometimes it feels like something else has stepped into the room with us.

I have never believed that ghosts are only about fear. Sometimes they are reminders. Sometimes they are love that never quite learned how to leave. Devils and specters mean nothing without the living heart. Without conscience. Without the possibility of redemption.

As the holidays arrive, I hope this season finds you far from the kind of loneliness Scrooge carried for so many years. I hope your home feels warm, even if it remembers other winters. And I hope the year ahead opens gently, bringing with it a second chance at kindness, connection, and hope.

Happy holidays to my readers and fellow lovers of the macabre. May the ghosts you encounter this season remind you not of fear, but of how deeply you are still capable of loving.