The Ghosts That Haunt Me

I used to have a tabletop pre-transistor AM radio that would emit this warm orange glow through its back grill. It wasn't a very bright light, but you could make out the shapes of objects a few feet away. It was like sitting next to the embers of a dying fire.

The radio had a large yellowish tuning knob and I would run that from one end of the scale to the other listening for someone to tell me a story after my mother had left the room and turned out the lights.

There were the local stations like CFCF, CJAD, and CFOX, but on a clear winter night I could also pick up stations in Boston, Chicago and New York City. These stations would come in only after the dial had been manipulated with the delicate touch of a safecracker and even then the signal would be riding a wave of static that would routinely rise up and drown it out completely.

Between the peaks of static, I would hear about traffic on the Dan Ryan, nor'easters threatening the Cape Cod, Boston and the Maine coast. It was while listening to this radio that I was introduced to "traffic and weather together on the eights" and to "The Shadow."

On various nights at different spots around the dial, I would find rebroadcasts of old radio shows. These programs would mix sitcoms like Fibber McGee & Molly with shows like The Whistler and Inner Sanctum. These programs were once mainstays of the airwaves long before call-in shows and before computers replaced disc jockeys.

The Shadow was ideally suited to radio because only at home, in the dark, could you accept the idea that one man could convince another that he was invisible. In real life, if you saw someone talking to an invisible crime fighter then you would contact organizations like ours.

Whereas radio sitcoms tended to thrive when translated to television and the movies, the spook shows were much less successful. The camera could never show anything as vivid as the images conjured by the imagination. It's the same reason that the best ghost stories are the ones we hear around the campfire, or from our friends. We remember these stories long after the punch lines of a great joke, the phone number of that cute girl, or where we left our car keys. Our brains file them some place different, some place more primal.

***

It will come as no surprise then that my favorite Christmas story is a ghost story.

"A Christmas Carol" tells the story of a man haunted by memory, by perspective and by possibility. Though often read to children, the story of Scrooge is the story of adults and their changing perspective on the holiday.

Children don't need ghost stories to know what Christmas is all about. They learn very quickly that it's all about them.

This is such a powerful idea that the traditions of the season become like critical ingredients in a recipe that we try to follow throughout our lives in order to recreate the perfect Christmas. What we learn as we grow older is that, like in cooking, some ingredients are not always available and substitutions are inevitable.

When we were children, those ingredients seemed to be in abundant supply. With few exceptions, the tree and its decorations, the meal and its menu, the guests and their jokes didn't vary all that much from one year to the next. And that was pretty comforting. No matter what happened throughout the year, Christmas was a red and green colored constant.

After I left home, the reassuring consistency of a family Christmas became even more important, but instead of having the whole month to marinate in it I only ever seemed to have a few days.

Compressing Christmas into smaller and smaller windows seemed to make it all the more important to get home and reconnect and regenerate. The traditions that evolved over time became desperate stations that had to be checked off in the hopes that some of the old self-affirming magic would return.

It was no wonder that the holidays were exhausting and came to be anticipated with a certain amount of dread.

And then there came the years when I couldn't be home for Christmas and even that couldn't be experienced without mixed emotions: I was both disappointed and relieved.

Dickens' story does a pitch-perfect job of capturing the contrasts and the mixed emotions that Christmas evokes in me. Christmas Past haunts me, Christmas Present is unsettling and Christmas Yet to Come is always challenging me to change my ways.

As I think about Christmas today, I find myself in a kind of a neutral zone trying to figure out what is left after all of the trimmings have been packed away.

There are no default answers. I do believe that it is important to work for peace on earth and goodwill to all. I like finding the perfect present and bringing a smile to the faces of the people I care about. (In the absence of a self-affirming answer, I will settle for affirming others.) I take comfort in making time to watch "White Christmas" and "Scrooge" (the 1951 version with Alastair Sim). But, unlike Scrooge, I don't think I have yet woken up from my dream. I think I am still working on the meaning of the season.

***

When I was growing up, one of the holiday staples was the annual Christmas show of local broadcaster Paul Reid.

Each year, he would devote one night of his show to stories of his childhood growing up in Peterborough, Ontario, as one of sixteen children, interspersed with holiday readings and Christmas music.

Reid had a magnificent voice for radio. It was warm, mellow, deep and tinged with a bit of sadness. He would guide his audience through the evening on a snowy Montreal night and make us think we were seated in front of a crackling fire listening to familiar tales.

Reid's fondness for the depression-era Christmases of his childhood was as undeniable as it was removed from his position as a big city radio host. It was almost as though he was telling these stories as a way of keeping them alive for himself.

I used to look forward to this show each year because it was something to look forward to. It was a fixture and a benchmark of the approaching holiday, like opening the doors on an advent calendar. I have been thinking about it recently because I recognize and connect to Reid's need to present it as a way of sustaining himself.

In the end, maybe that's all there is. Perhaps it is in the act of creating joy and obtaining some measure of satisfaction that we are really learning from the ghosts that haunt us.

Happy holidays.

--Graham Campbell
Associate Director