Musings on Christmas Eve in Stories

I don’t know when I first started to love Christmas Eve even more than the morning that follows it, but it probably had something to do with A Christmas Carol.

Growing up in Atlanta, every year the Alliance Theatre would put on a beautiful, lavish, gothic production of Charles Dickens’ classic story—and since the director was my dad’s high-school drama teacher and longtime friend, we’d always get a few free tickets. It became my most recognizable harbinger of the Christmas season. During COVID, they even did a drive-in version of the show. In 2021, they replaced the existing show (which had run for 20 years straight) with a far inferior adaptation, and since then I’ve clung to every other incarnation of the story that I can get.

There’s so much that I love about A Christmas Carol: its sense of humor, its quietly cosmic time-travel ghost-story premise, the depth of its characters, its rich capacity for diverse adaptation, its timeless resonance. In all of it, I think I love the darkness the most. A Christmas Carol vividly depicts the bitter cold atmosphere of Dickensian London, the turmoil awaiting sinners who do not accept forgiveness, the plight of the poor and destitute, and most of all: the strange, ethereal, eerie anticipation of Christmas Eve.

In any Christmas Carol adaptation, Scrooge’s walk home from work through the foggy streets of London—and then up the stairs of his shadow-bathed house—is one of my favorite mood-setting sequences. The momentary materializing of Marley’s ghastly face on the knocker. The bowl of gruel solitarily consumed by a fireplace covered in Dutch tiles depicting scenes from The Bible. The ominous ringing of the servant bells. In the production that I grew up seeing, the ghost of Marley appears during the walk home among crowds of carolers and street merchants, reaching out and calling Scrooge’s name only to disappear the moment he turns around. There’s a sense that something awaits Scrooge as the setting sun gives way to the silent night of nights. I’d say it’s “foreboding,” but it’s a little less definitively dreadful than that. There are chills, unquestionably, but—well, is there an obscure German word that describes the faint sense that something strange and wondrous is waiting in the wings despite the darkness? Scrooge may be terrified, but we know that he’s about to be offered a profound and momentary chance to save his eternal soul. I guess that’s Christmas in a nutshell. Anticipation.

I’ve seen a lot of Christmas Carol adaptations over the years, and I’ve developed two pet peeves among them: the adaptations that reduce the deep spiritual salvation of the story to “celebrating the magic of Christmas,” and the adaptations that smooth out the gothic horror into something overly light and friendly. That’s all to say: the cutesy and Illumination-esque Netflix musical version of A Christmas Carol from last year is my mortal nemesis. My favorite incarnation of the story (in film, anyway) is a far more obscure one: the 25-minute 1971 Richard Williams hand-drawn animated special, which feels suitably uncanny and otherworldly through and through.

A Christmas Carol defined Christmas Eve in my heart and mind from a young age as a fundamentally mysterious time, and my favorite part of Christmas—and these days, the other seasonal media that I enjoy tends to provoke similar feelings about the night.

One such movie is The Polar Express—a film that has been pretty divisive over the years because of its uncanny-valley animation style. But what if I said that the creep factor is part of the inherent appeal? The Polar Express perfectly captures the strange magic we’ve been talking about. A ghostly train that appears out of nowhere in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve? That’s exactly the type of vibe I’m on these days. On top of it all, the film is an almost Pilgrim’s Progress-junior archetypical narrative about belief and doubt, with the nameless hero boy being challenged by various specters (including a deeply mysterious hobo) to examine his own heart and faith. But The Polar Express captures another aspect of Christmas Eve that has always made it so interesting to me: its fleeting, dreamlike temporality. The Conductor is constantly checking his pocketwatch to make sure the train arrives on time. Marley’s Ghost tells Scrooge, “Hear me! My time is nearly gone!” The magic only lasts through the night, like a spell about to wear off. The morning is coming. This dream can’t last forever—not yet, anyway.

Another piece of media I’ve rediscovered recently that captures this temporal, short-lived reverie has been the 1982 British animated short called The Snowman. From what I’ve heard, it’s Charlie Brown Christmas for the UK—in the sense that it’s distinctly melancholic and kids and adults alike watch it every year. I watched The Snowman as a child and it embedded itself deep into my memories like an enigmatic dream. When I rewatched it for the first time this year, the experience was strangely cathartic—in no small part due to the ethereal quality of the animation, the song “Walking in The Air,” and the moody Christmas Eve setting. The short’s mournful ending, where the Snowman melts in the morning but leaves behind evidence that the night was real and not just imaginary, stands in stark contrast to the jollier conclusions of stories like Frosty The Snowman in America. Other favorites have followed: Arthur Christmas is a race-against-time story to save Christmas Eve, and for what it’s worth, Die Hard and Home Alone are similarly charged with that temporal evening magic. Home Alone is basically just Die Hard for kids!

Perhaps the most mystifying Christmas Eve, though, is the original. A group of lonely shepherds staring into the dark wilderness and trying to keep warm around the fire, suddenly surprised by an otherworldly apparition in the sky. A procession of wise kings and stargazers looking for answers and finding a strange and unexplainable light in the heavens that shouldn’t be there. A divine creator born in the cold, surrounded by the very humans and animals he once spoke into existence, quietly fulfilling the ancient cries of both prophets and slaves for a savior. A world changed forever in the humblest and most astonishing place.

The people of old sang with much longing, “O come, O come Emmanuel.” Now he is here, and he’s nothing like what we expected. Amid the darkness and the light, the command to “be not afraid” rises to the surface. This is a night of strange, frightening happenings orchestrated by celestial beings previously outside the time and space of our world. But they are meant for our good—and indeed, if we trust instead of tremble, they will be for our salvation. Scrooge worries he will fall to his death when he accepts the spirit’s offer to save him. “Bear but a touch of my hand there,” says the spirit, placing it on his heart, “and you shall be upheld in more than this.”

I try to remember this cosmic significance during every Christmas and Advent season. It’s almost like a distant cousin of Halloween—but while on Halloween I’ll always find myself staring off into the chilly autumn air wondering if something spooky might occur, Christmas Eve has me staring into that same dark night sky wondering what kind of peculiar wonders might be waiting to emerge in blinding light.

When I was young, I read about an old yuletide myth saying that the animals in the stable in Bethlehem could temporarily speak at midnight on Christmas Eve. For two years in a row, my sister and I stayed up until the clock struck twelve to see if our pet rabbits would say anything to us. There were no words we could hear, of course, but I’ve still got a mind to be the type of person who expects that someday that kind of magic might materialize again.

When I arrived in Czech Republic for Christmas this year, I learned that Christmas Eve is the primary time of celebration for most of Eastern Europe rather than the next day. All morning and afternoon on the 24th are spent in anticipation of sundown, and of the ringing bell signaling that the gifts have miraculously appeared under the tree. This image, of light and bells and surprise and wonder in darkness, has touched me greatly—perhaps, in some ways, even more than the image of gifts discovered as the sun rises. After all, it’s the contrast between the darkness and the light in all of these stories that emphasizes both all the more. We mourn in lonely exile here, in the winter cold, until suddenly and unexpectedly, the Son of God appears.

Rejoice, rejoice.