A most wonderful Christmas Ghost story. I know I tend to overenthuse, but Green Holly by Elizabeth Bowen is, for me, one of the best ghost stories in English from the mid 20th Century.
Bowen removes ghosts from their history of clanking and scaring and contrasts them with the ordinary world or ordinary importance (the war effort in 1944) and suggests that our aspirations for romance and glamour are phantasms, which neverthless we prefer to real life.
See what you think.
Elizabeth Bowen (1899 to 1973-Dublin). Bowen believed in ghosts and other strange things. Her stories about England during World War II aBowen did not just sit back and watch the war. She was an air raid warden. When bombs fell, she walked her route to make sure people were in shelters and had turned off their lights. When she was writing her stories, it wasn't at all clear who would win the war. Bowen later said that she had never felt more alive than when the blitz was going on.
Green Holly