It's Christmas Eve, dear reader, and we're terribly excited. To mark the occassion, Oh Comely staff share their ghosts of Christmases past and present in an e-toast to tradition and ritual.

"Every December I listen to a different audiobook of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. An unabridged reading takes around three hours so I'm usually able to get through it over a couple of crisp, lonely walks around Hackney Marshes. I absolutely adore the book: we take it for granted because it's so elegantly constructed, but it's a nearly perfect thing. It gives me a much-needed yearly reminder that change is achievable and it is always possible to be one's best, most compassionate self."

- Jason Ward, Associate Editor

"With age I've grown to marvel at how perfectly executed my mother's Christmas efforts were. Every year she'd buy a cannister of fake snow and spray it from doorstep to tree. She'd then put on a pair of oversized worker boots and stomp all over the floor, leaving a trail of Santa-sized footprints. She'd also half-destroy a mince pie and carrot to provide hard evidence of reindeer activity.

My brother and I would emerge from our slumber at some ungodly hour, spot them from the top of the stairs and lose ourselves entirely, squealing "He's beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeen!". The year it stopped is the year I realised we'd all got horribly grown up horribly quickly."

- Aimee-lee Abraham, Editorial Assistant

"Every Christmas Eve, my Father would read us The Night Before Christmas poem aloud."

- Rosanna Durham, Editor

"For our Christmas stockings when I was a child, my mum used her mother's own single-leg stockings that she had worn suspender-style in the 50s. The thin material meant they were enormously stretchy and semi-transparent. We used to try and peer through them on Christmas morning to see what was inside."

- Liz Bennett, Editor

Image: Courtesy of one of our lovely readers @isayraar.