From Tatterhood to A Christmas Carol

Tatterhood is one of my favorite fairy tales. It begins with a queen who performs a ritual in hopes of having a child, and winds up with two daughters. One is beautiful and sweet, and the other is Tatterhood: an absolute force of chaos who's ugly, rides on a goat and wields a wooden spoon. She's named for the ragged hood she wears.
"One Christmas eve . . . there arose a frightful noise and clatter in the hallway outside the queen's apartment. . . . it was a pack of trolls and witches who had come there to celebrate Christmas.”
Tatterhood fights the trolls off; however, when her sister peeks in to see what’s going on, she ends up with her head stolen and replaced with a calf’s head, kicking off a quest to the land of the trolls to set things right. 

So this technically makes this fairy tale a Christmas story.

This is a Norwegian tale collected by  Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe. A Scottish equivalent, "Kate Crackernuts," doesn't involve a troll-infested Yuletide; however, a similar troll incident appears in another Norwegian tale, also from  Asbjørnsen and Moe. This is is "The Cat on the Dovrefjell," where trolls again wreak havoc on a certain home every Christmas Eve (and here are driven off by a traveler's pet bear). So we have this Norwegian motif of trolls on Christmas.

Many cultures had traditions that the darkest, coldest part of the year was associated with supernatural happenings. The Wild Hunt, consisting of ghosts and/or demons, might ride at night. Children born during this time might become werewolves; it was a time for fortune telling; animals might talk on Christmas night. The folk figure Frau Perchta or Frau Holda would visit homes with a retinue of child-ghosts known as the Heimchen. Moving into Catholic lore, Saint Nicholas would show up to bestow gifts accompanied by the devilish Krampus. (Modern incarnations of the Krampus often show up as opponents or ideological opposites of Santa Claus, but in the original traditions, the Krampus and similar figures are servants and companions of jolly old Saint Nick. Complementary rather than opposed.)

People prepared their homes and left out food offerings for Frau Perchta and her crew, to avoid punishment or earn blessings . . . which is probably how we get to leaving out milk and cookies for Santa Claus. Although Frau Perchta was supposed to disembowel people who didn't appease her, and the worst you'd get from Santa is coal in your stocking.
 
This was, again, the darkest and coldest time of the year, a time of transition - and a time when people would be stuck inside trying to stay warm and entertain themselves during the long nights. Thus, winter nights were a perfect time for spooky stories. This tradition that became especially popular in England, with ghost stories specifically at Christmas being a trend in the 18th and 19th centuries. This led to such works as Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol in 1843, where spirits and ghosts visit an old miser on Christmas Eve in a socially conscious fable. Dickens went on to publish quite a few Christmas-themed ghost stories in magazines, although A Christmas Carol remains by far the most famous; he really shaped the trend and got it going, with other authors such as Wilkie Collins and Arthur Conan Doyle writing such stories.

But today, the only well-known remnants - at least in the U.S. - are A Christmas Carol and Andy Williams's 1963 song “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” which mentions "scary ghost stories and tales of the glories of Christmasses long, long ago."

Sources and Further Reading

• Lecouteux, Claude. Phantom Armies of the Night: The Wild Hunt and the Ghostly Processions of the Undead. 2011.
• Ridenour, Al. The Krampus and the Old, Dark Christmas: Roots and Rebirth of the Folkloric Devil. 2016.
• Rutigliano, Olivia. "On the Lost Christmastime Tradition of TellingGhost Stories." CrimeReads. 2020.
• Yuko, Elizabeth. "How Ghost Stories Became a Christmas Tradition in Victorian England," History. 2021.