"A Christmas Carol" (Credit: ABC) Being an imaginative people contending with shorter and shorter days and coming from a place where the spirits of the past always held sway, the English do something with Christmas that we Americans tend not to do. They use the holiday as an opportunity to amuse themselves, and stoke their senses of wonder, by scaring each other out of their minds with ghost stories. Picture this: you are hanging out with your friends, the mulled wine is flowing, it is a Saturday, dark at 4:45 in the afternoon, and someone has an idea to see who can come up with the scariest story concerning the vapory dead.