It has long puzzled me that Christmas is so often coupled with ghost stories. The most famous, of course, being Dickens’ &uot;Christmas Carol.&uot;

The Victorians, though, often associated Christmas with ghosts. Perhaps this was a subconscious wish to bring back the holidays of childhood, when holidays are so much more magnificent than they seem when we are adults.

Because the older we are the more vacancies there are at the Christmas hearthside and our nostalgia for the past can be so extreme that we would gladly welcome our beloved ghosts.

There was a time when people gathered for the express purpose of holding seances, sittings in which the possibility of communicating with the dead is held forth.

Whether or not such sittings are still held I don’t know. They were still quite common in my childhood. I was personally acquainted with people who attended them. The mother of one of my friends, a widow, was disillusioned when a voice purporting to be that of her dead husband spoke to her through a medium. Whoever did the speaking used atrocious grammar and her husband had been a well-educated man.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, was a believer and even wrote a book on the subject.

In my family, sitting in at a seance, like visiting a fortune teller, was a no-no. It was considered a blasphemy.

An exception was my maternal grandfather. Some 18 years older than my grandmother, he was extremely interested in spiritualism. Early in their marriage, while traveling they spent a night in a hotel where a seance was being arranged. My grandmother, a minister’s daughter, was passionately against attending, but was persuaded to go with her husband.

They were both strangers to everyone else at the sitting. My grandmother, who knew her Bible well, recalled Saul’s sin in having the witch at Endor call up Samuel, shut her eyes and prayed.

She said later that she kept in her mind that &uot;If this is the work of God the medium will be successful. If it’s the work of the devil nothing will come of it.&uot;

When the medium announced that a young man, in Confederate uniform, whose given name began with a &uot;J&uot; wished to speak to someone in the room, my grandmother ignored it. Her brother, Jacob, had died in the Civil War, but she wasn’t convinced that he’d be mixed up in anything like this.

She continued her silent prayers and in a little while the medium pointed her out as an obstacle and asked her to please leave the meeting. Nothing went any better after she was gone, she learned, but she was thankful for her release.

Years afterwards, one of my mother’s older sisters, then in her teens, was a guest at a house party at a nearby farm. A group of young people were attending the gathering and were delighted when arrangements were made for a seance to be held one night.

Knowing her mother’s views on the subject, my aunt decided not to attend. When her current boyfriend, knowing how the family felt, ordered her to skip the meeting, though, she changed her mind and decided to go.

At the last minute, out of respect for her mother, she refrained and went to bed. Sometime during the night the covers on the bed lifted. Despite the fact that she clutched at them and tried to hold them back, they sailed off. Next morning they were lying on the floor, not crumpled, but straight and square. She had managed to hold on to her pillow. When she told the story, she said if it had gone, too, she felt she would have screamed the house down. She, also, said that she walked well around the covers on the floor, being careful not to touch them.

I’ve never had the slightest desire to attend a seance, but I love reading about them in whodunits. I remember being delighted with a movie entitled, &uot;The Uninvited.&uot;

It’s remarkable how many ghost stories my cousins and I heard and absorbed in view of the fact that our parents made every effort to keep us from hearing them. I suppose they left us a bit nervous from time to time, but we were at least spared the violence of television.

Love Cruikshank is an Albert Lea resident. Her column appears Thursdays.