Cosmic horror and commercialized Christmas

Last week at The Critic, Sebastian Milbank published an excellent essay on MR James and the English tradition of celebrating Christmas with ghost stories. The most famous is A Christmas Carol, of course, but the “scary ghost stories” of “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” used to be much more common. James’s are still the gold standard—atmospheric, spooky, and presented with a sober believability that only enhances their terror. But this tradition has mostly disappeared, leaving some people wondering why ghost stories would ever have been an appropriate way to celebrate the Nativity in the first place.

Milbank makes a strong case that the ghost story in fact complements the Nativity story, which is already a story of a dark world under the sway of violent forces human and otherwise, of a battle of good and evil waged on both the mortal and immortal planes, and of the intrusion of the supernatural and the revelation and overthrow of the hidden workings of the world. This is cosmic horror pre-Lovecraft, a horror made all too real in the mundane acts of destruction carried out by the enemies of the newborn Christ: “God incarnate is smuggled out of a homeland rendered a slaughterhouse of children by a corrupt puppet of a foreign power.”

Milbank’s entire essay is good, so please read it. But this mention of the massacre of the innocents—commemorated today, December 28, as the Feast of Holy Innocents—as well as a point Milbank raises a few times in his essay brought to mind an old but often overlooked Christmas carol that never fails to move me: “The Coventry Carol.”

“The Coventry Carol” was originally performed in late medieval England as part of a mystery play about the Nativity. A short, simple song of four stanzas, it is a lullaby sung by the mothers of Bethlehem to their children, slaughtered on Herod’s orders. Here are the lyrics in both Middle and Modern English, and here’s an excellent a capella performance. Here’s the final stanza:

That woe is me, poor child, for thee,
and ever mourn and may
for thy parting neither say nor sing,
“Bye bye, lully lullay.”

Gentle and plaintive, it is written as both the lament of a specific mother (mourning “this child” and “this poor youngling”) and of every mother of one of the innocents (“we” beg for help in protecting a child, “for whom we do sing”). The song is both individual and communal—and deeply sad.

Or, as we might put it now, “depressing” or even “traumatizing.” You’ll likely not have heard it a single time on the radio or store PA systems this shopping season. If our sanitized, secularized version of Christmas only grudgingly acknowledges the role of the birth of Christ in this annual cash cow, it certainly doesn’t want you complicating even that with something like the Massacre of the Innocents. Grief is not commercial.

To bring it back to Milbank, he notes the simplifying, emotionally foreshortening effect of commercialism several times in his essay, and that the ghost story is a way of embracing the fulness of the Nativity and pushing back against the age. Not only this, but it makes room for those who enter Christmas in moods or circumstances for which the maniacally upbeat tinsel and sleighbells version proves ill-fitting: “Reflecting on Christmas’s shadow is helpful not just as a sign of seriousness, but because it offers a real consolation to those for whom Christmas is not easy, and a touch of chill that adds to the warmth of the festivities.”

He comes back to this point at the end of the essay:

When we return home for Christmas, many of us will be wrestling with sudden loss, family conflict, or the disappointments of the past year. Rather than uncomfortably nursing these feelings in the artificial radiance of the modern Christmas, we should make sense of them through the deeper and more ancient rhythms of the turning of the year, in which light and shadow are the interplay of an unseen harmony. We should embrace Christmas as a season to mourn our sorrows and embrace our joys with equal passion.

Occasionally I’ll play “The Coventry Carol” in class and invite the students to consider 1) that this is a Christmas song, 2) what kind of baggage we bring to that concept, and 3) this song’s original audience. The Massacre of the Innocents was a common subject of medieval art, and quite likely everyone who poured into Coventry to crowd around the mobile stages to watch the play and hear the songs had lost people before their time—husbands or wives, siblings, parents, and most especially children. They participated in a lament like “The Coventry Carol” in a way most of us can only imagine. The grief of the mothers of Bethlehem encompasses them, including them in Christmas, too.

I find my students respond to this. They’ll have heard complaints about the commercialism of Christmas at least since the time they were old enough to watch “A Charlie Brown Christmas” (just in case we’re tempted to think this is a new problem). The Christians among them may have felt uncomfortable before with the mismatch they’ve felt between their own season of life and either the uniform, phony, lunatic merriment being pumped at them by the culture or the static, comfortable image of peace implied by the manger scene. They may have even complained about it.

What the Victorian ghost story with its supernatural horror and “The Coventry Carol” with its human loss show us is that our Christmas is the aberration, and if we want to incorporate grief—which, after all, Christ was born to conquer—we don’t have to come up with new ways of inclusion, we just have to recover the old.