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One Christmas a few years ago, my wife - understanding my penchant for the darkness - gave me an anthology of yuletide tales titled "An Oxford Book of Christmas Stories."

At first, I was taken aback. The stories, many of the horror and supernatural genres, were about such things as a drunken father returning home on Christmas day, a child drawn to the biting ghost of a dead youth, a kid wandering unsafely alone in the night, shades of Roman soldiers treading through Britain, a grandmother's death and more.

It felt so not-Christmas. So different from the insistently jingling bells, good cheer, sparkling tinsel and profligate gift-giving that had dominated my Christmas consciousness to that date.

The more I've thought about it over the years, however, the more appropriate I find the anthology to be. In fact, it may not be nearly dark enough.

There are good reasons Christmas is positioned so close to the Winter Solstice - the darkest day of the year, yet, at the same time, the encouraging point at which the darkness begins its slow retreat. The symbolism, both solemn and hopeful, is old - reaching back to the orgies of Saturnalia and beyond, I suspect, to the origins of homo sapiens. It clearly tracks with the birth of Christ, the "light and hope of the world," in a time of abject despair.

For one thing, the deeper the darkness, the brighter the light must seem once the warm sun begins to illuminate the earth and coax life from the the gray and the shriveled. It's said, wisely, I think, that those who suffer may best appreciate the joys of life, once they come around. They do not take good times for granted.

People enjoy ghost stories by the campfire after sundown, in part, because while the characters in the tale are eaten alive, the audience, by grateful contrast, is safe. Natural human wariness of dark closing in enhances the relief.

For another, the darkness can be a positive in itself, under the right circumstances.

Scandinavians, living through the long winters of the north, understand the comforts of darkness - seasonal affective disorders aside. They even have words, such as "hygge," which speak to this. The words represent, say, the feelings of warmth and the promise of good food and fellowship evoked by the orange glow of a candle in a farmhouse window. It's important in this image that the glow is seen from a distance by a visitor trudging, during a long, quiet night, through deep, silver-blue snow. You don't get real hygge without cold and dark.

Perhaps our natural, heightened sensitivity in darkness is what makes moonlit landscapes and black forests the source of so many of our encounters with the preternatural - many of them helpful.

In any case, while the night does, indeed, turn a corner at Christmas, it's destined to be dark and cold outside for a long time yet. The bustling around Christmas feels frenetic to me. I imagine Saturnalian orgies would have felt the same - premature, at best. Give me solemn intimacy at Christmas - and more weird, scary stories, to boot.