The Nightmare of Christmas

The title of Tim Burton’s animated musical, The Nightmare Before Christmas, is a pun on the poem by Clement Clark Moore called ‘A Visit from St. Nicholas’, which famously begins, ‘Twas the night before Christmas’… The title of this post, however, is ‘The Nightmare of Christmas’, because, as I’ll explain, we seem to have forgotten the origins of this holiday and the nightmare that was the midwinter period. My plan is to disinter this forgotten history and remind you why Christmas (and not Halloween) is the real holiday of horror.

The Christmas period occurs during the winter solstice which marks the moment the earth (in the Northern Hemisphere) is tilted furthest from the sun, giving us longest night of the year. Before there was a thing called Christmas, there were festivities surrounding the solstice, including the Saturnalia, the most famous of Roman festivals, in which society was turned upside down for seven days beginning on the 17th of December. In her book, The Dead of Winter, Sarah Clegg says that the best way for us to understand this celebration is to think of the current Carnival season:

the topsy-turvy madness of Carnival may be one of our best ways of experiencing something close to our older Christmas celebrations. The chaos, the costumes, the flipping of the social order and the wild, hierarchy- shredding freedom of Carnival were all initially associated…