After finishing a short story by Louisa May Alcott — The Abbot's Ghost (A Christmas Story), I had by a little epiphany about English Christmas in the 1800s.

In jolly old England, Christmas was often about ghosts and hauntings, a bit closer to what we would regard as Halloween. The story has a young woman bursting into flame, a young man crushed to death by a falling horse and everyone telling scary stories by firelight. In fact, in the 1820s, English writers worried that the holiday was dying out. Another ghost story seemed to revive it, Dickens' A Christmas Carol written in the 1840s — ghosts, coffins, dragging chains, doorknocker monsters.

Christmas, as we know it, hasn't been as we know it, for all that long.

Illustrations by Thomas Nast in Harper's Magazine gave Americans the first modern image of Santa Claus in the 1880s, although even then Christmas had a seriously dark side with lumps of coal for miscreant youngsters and the little match-girl freezing to death in the corner as she hallucinated images of her dead grandmother.

Reindeer on the roof, an orgy of presents Christmas morning and tiny tots with their eyes all aglow is a world away from the gloomy fireside ghost stories of not so long ago.

Christmas, as we know it, hasn't been as we know it, for all that long. Merry Christmas and Boooo.