SHAKESPEARE said “a sad tale’s best for winter”, especially “one of sprites and goblins”.

In the Tickell household – like well-boiled brussels sprouts or fried breadcrumbs with the roast – ghost stories are a non-negotiable part of the festive season.

Whether it is Ebenezer Scrooge shaking hands with the Ghost of Christmas Past – ideally accompanied by The Muppets – or ­Christopher Lee and Michael Hordern reading MR James’s most evocative short stories, Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without spiking all that port and stilton with that annual dash of the uncanny, the eldritch and the strange.

It takes me straight to childhood. I don’t have a particularly superstitious mind, but since I’ve been a kid I’ve had a ­superstitious imagination.

Christmas has always a time when – for many kids – the two worlds touch and boundaries are thin.

The games and ploys parents use to persuade their kids that “Santa’s been” leaves sooty fingerprints on the adult imagination too. But so does the climate and the landscape.

You can’t be a northern European ­without reckoning with the pervasive ­darkness which sees the sun barely rise for weeks on end, and on a wet and overcast day watch as the early afternoon ­collapses into evening grey. They call it the dark ­season for a reason.

We sometimes overlook the fact that the ­classic festive scene described by good King Wenceslas is intrinsically weird. Even the lighting is gothic.

At this time of year, the landscape itself can assume an ­uncanny, angular – even undead quality – as thrawn suns crawl under the horizon, and the moon sends shadows reeling in the ­flickering light.

Knives out
With snow, there’s the eerie backlight from frost on the ground, as moonlight cuts leaves like knives out of the surrounding darkness.

Without it, there’s the ­watchful gloom in hollow woods of conifers, as the apparently lifeless earth, brown and ­carpeted in needles, explodes with the ­sudden start of pheasants or kicks up the ­zig-zag flight of a woodcock, making its bid for freedom like a dart of autumn.

Watch that and you realise a Scottish December isn’t a bad time to push back against the disenchantment of the world.

Being a child of the 1980s, every........

© Herald Scotland