The Ghost of Christmas Future
by Emma Kernahan | Dialect Writers Collective
December 2025
IT WAS WHEN WE FIRST HAD OUR CHRISTMAS at the Trinity Rooms in Stroud that I first started seeing ghosts.
It was the second year this event had happened, run by the Stroud Earth Community who had recently taken on the running of the hall from the local church - and although we didn’t know it yet, it would be the first year that a moderately sized, unassuming red brick hall and former World War One hospital on the outskirts of Stroud in Gloucestershire would start to change our futures.
For us, it was our first year after the death of my partner's parents, and although we hesitated at a break from tradition, it felt like a happy solution for the emotional, financial and logistical work of celebrating Christmas with children while grieving for grandparents.
Back then, even locally, most of the people I spoke to reacted with a gently raised eyebrow, the word 'community' conjuring atmosphere free, strip-lit worthiness.
This should be limited to a bit of volunteering in the morning at most, shouldn’t it? For Christmas? they asked. For your actual Christmas lunch? From those who had spent the year telling me on Facebook that 'charity begins at home' I got an eye-roll and mentions of virtue signalling - the virtue presumably being that we would meet some great people and give them a lift to lunch, drive some hot plates to Paganhill, and in exchange get a banging meal with no cooking and very little washing up.
On the day, even after a leisurely morning tea and no military operation in the kitchen, I still wondered if I’d made a mistake. But then we strolled down the road, pushed open the door of the Trinity Rooms, my doubts burned away like brandy off a Christmas pud, because what I saw very clearly in that half second as the door swung open, what I saw in there amid a wave of warmth and laughing and candlelight were– and please bear with me on this – what I saw were ghosts.
To be fair, before I get into explaining this, I should be clear that I am openly ghost obsessed at this time of year. My annual read is A Christmas Carol, written in 1843 by Charles Dickens. Notoriously spirit heavy, has been adapted into so many versions it feels like there is one for every year between us and Dickens at his desk in London, lowering his pen to the page to tell us, to begin with, that Marley was dead.
Even if you haven't read this book as often as I have, or even at all, it's hard to deny that it looms large in our collective understanding of Christmas spirit(s).
Each year, from supermarket ads to tiktok reels, Scrooge is summoned. Each year we are shown two possible futures, and each year we watch Ebeneezer wake, transformed, into a better one of his own making.
Each year Tiny Tim (who did not die) sits down to a goose supper and a future of his own, reminding us that we still capable of imagining such a thing, if we try.
I'd like the record to state that the Muppets Christmas Carol is historically accurate in showing Dickens' real life pen underscoring of the word 'not' through the medium of Gonzo in a top hat - and for this and for countless other reasons it is the finest adaptation that has ever existed and if you disagree you’ll have to fight me in a top hat — sorry but those are the rules.
But there is another scene that loops in our minds when we think of Christmas - whether you know it or not - and that is Fred's party.
Fred, Scrooge's nephew, who hosts his friends and family for games and food and warmth. Fred, who invites Scrooge to his house every year, undeterred by his steady, inexorable retreat behind hoarded wealth and the gates of a chilly home.
In the book, we peep into this party alongside Scrooge and the ghost of Christmas present. Standing outside in the snow, we watch Fred and his friends dance and play jokes on each other, and like Scrooge we long for the uncomplicated happiness of an open heart.
There's another layer to this that always gives me a few extra goosebumps: it's in fact the ghosts of Dickens' real early family Christmases that we see here, frozen in time.
Sometimes I wonder if the Dickens family ever imagined they would still be flitting through the minds of so many millions of people, so far into the future. I wonder if, just for a second, they glimpsed us watching them as they played Christmas games, our faces pressed up against a candle-lit window.
Consciously or not, this image of the real Christmas - open, warm, deeply collective, resonates so deeply with our pre-industrial memory that we still find ourselves trying to recreate it over and over again in a million different ways as we creak towards the darkest day.
But as I pushed open the door to the Trinity Rooms, my medieval brain instinctively recognised the ghost of Christmas past as it greeted me.
In that moment, only one thought drifted out of my subconscious, a Victorian illustration surfacing out of the tinselled mists of a 1980’s Christmas in North Devon. Ah! I thought. Here it is. Fred's party. I finally get to go in.
I mean, to be fair to the sceptics the candlelight was a one off. A power cut had knocked everything out just as the food finished cooking and for an hour things felt slightly more pre-industrial than intended.
But there were two electricians in the crowd, and they fixed it for free, and I'm just going to say that people who've holidayed at Soho House or at the Savoy or who have dropped a grand on food in Fortnum & Mason, they might think they've had a good Christmas party, but have they tried hearing a room of nearly 200 neighbours in paper hats cheering when the lights come back on in a community hall.
Having experienced it, I'm going to tell you, you are wasting your money on anything else.
And so, without hesitation we returned, and kept returning. In 2025, the Stroud Community Christmas is a genuinely groundbreaking beast of an event, now in its fourth year and growing like wildfire into it's largest iteration so far.
Unseen, the cogs of this machine actually start to turn from September, with a single Coordinator (this year, the amazing Cassy Witts) bringing in dozens of volunteers to plan, adapt and pull off a shared meal for hundreds of people, with donated food, in two different community locations: The Trinity Rooms and, across town, the equally brilliant Paganhill Community Hub, otherwise known as The Octagon.
Central to its success is the way it flips the narrative on community events in two important ways. Firstly, in delivery. This is about people turning up to be at an event co-created by the community it serves.
There are no givers and receivers of charity here. Sometimes you're serving the food, sometimes you're being served. Sometimes you're washing up, sometimes you're getting a comfy chair and a cup of tea.
Secondly, in continuity. In many places, 'community' means charity, and charity often means an influx of money and volunteers for December, and then the 'Christmas Spirit' box is ticked and there is nothing but tumbleweed for the next 11 months (especially January).
This is equally true for the foodbanks which generally receive their lowest levels of donations in January after a pre-Christmas boost
Where 'community at Christmas' does happen, it's presented as a one off event - like a Jubilee or a World Cup final – while the regular work of support is for charities.
Christmas volunteering is not normally a bunch of neighbours who have supported each other all year, sitting together as equals.
And yet – that is precisely what happens here. Each Christmas Day is in fact the culmination of a year of non-stop events, gatherings, planning and hoping, in the middle of this small town in Gloucestershire.
Want to join a choir? Here are two. Fancy watching foreign language documentaries? No problem.
Need your toaster repairing for free while you have a spot of lunch? Easy as.
Gong bath?
Punk night?
Shared work space?
Writing retreat?
Commons Festival?
Seed and plant sales?
Large scale food redistribution?
A youth club?
Local history workshops?
Access to welfare support?
A community lunch for upwards of 100 people of all backgrounds every week using only local sourced and high quality food?
Oh and - everything pay as you can? Of course, of course, of course.
And, like a heart, it is entirely made up of muscle. It takes a huge amount of work to include the interests of a whole community, to dovetail the needs of so many different people.
Harder still to do this without any apparent effort, the warmth and ease of the welcome disguising all the energy required to keep it that way.
Not everyone here is right in the middle of this process, not everyone is in the WhatsApp groups or trained in the principles of sociocracy that underpin it, not everyone has the spare resources to be at the very centre of the organising, cooking, cleaning, shifting, connecting and bare knuckle grafting that have made the Trinity Rooms what it is over the last few years.
But if you were to knock on any door within a half mile radius of this building, the chances are you'll either find someone who has helped out at some point, or who has visited for one of it's thousands of events and general knees ups.
2025 has been a mast year for the Trinity Rooms in more ways than one.
The Church of England, which has owned the hall since it was built, is now selling it.
For a whole year, its events have pivoted into fundraisers, as we raced to secure the hall for the community, forever.
Ashley Loveridge
Part of a flurry of community ownership campaigns across the area since the Pandemic, the Trinity Rooms has itself been an incubator for this movement, hosting fundraisers and planning meetings for nearly all of the local campaigns at different points, also connecting them with thinking on this nationally.
The Octagon in Paganhill is another vital place trying desperately to buy the land it stands on, and it needs everyone’s help.
The Heavens, 102 acres of land at the other end of the road from the Trinity Rooms, was one of the groups that fundraised here.
£200,000 is needed to secure the building. At the moment the tally stands, tantalisingly, at just under £190,000.
And we need those last few thousand pounds by – yes, you guessed it – by Christmas.
Less than five days from now, as I write this. In the last 6 weeks, £2000 of that money has been raised, and I cannot stress this enough, from cake alone! Go on, Stroud! The way my neighbourhood has rallied and hustled to raise this money for a whole year has been jaw dropping.
And if – if! - we pull it off, it would be (excuse me, I’m so sorry, I’m on my third chocolate orange) a Christmas miracle.
One Year Ago
ONE YEAR AGO, WHEN I SAT DOWN FOR Christmas dinner for the second time, word had got out and the hall was packed to the rafters.
With a roast in one hand and a pudding in the other (I’m no fool) we grabbed a spot on one of the trestle tables laid out on the side of the hall, where iron framed beds once held convalescing WW1 soldiers.
The noise of nearly 200 people celebrating pulled us physically closer to each other to hear ourselves speak.
We spoke about the extraordinary nature of the shift in this place, in the face of all the challenges we were facing. Over the year, there had been plenty of ghoulish figures trailing us around in the ether, telling us belts must be tightened, that things will only get worse, and to survive we must hoard what we have for ourselves, to fight over the crumbs.
Ben Chapman
They are still with us, those bony, spectral fingers, pointing to an angry life and the black finality of the grave.
But sitting in that room, it became easier to see right through them. Look at us, the crowd hummed. We aren't waiting for a new pot of funding, or a new policy, or a new government.
We aren't waiting to be told we can do this. Nobody is coming to save us, we are saving ourselves. Look what we can do, look what any group of people can do, with just a bit of land; with, to borrow a phrase from a friend, nothing but imagination, and four walls and a roof.
That is what my neighbours have been baking and dancing and singing and playing for all year. We have seen that bleak vision of the future, and we've given it nearly £200,000 worth of Ho!Ho!Ho! This place, our hope, our silliness - it will not die, we say, our pens scoring a line into the page.
One year ago, I looked along the tables and saw the ghosts again, but even more of them this time.
Here were the local volunteer nurses from 1914, drifting across the tables and dishing out tea.
At the sides of the room stood a crowd of kids from the very first party here, the opening of the Trinity Rooms in 1884, laughing alongside the kids from the youth club, still in the future. Over in the corner is the solid figure of William Cowle, Victorian grocer, benefactor and improver, hatcher of mad schemes like public observatories (now gone) and the hospital next door (still there).
Seb Bacon
Around me, I caught snippets of conversations that hadn’t happened yet – 93 year old Ken telling me about the outbreak of World War Two, his mother hanging laundry in the garden of the house he still lives in.
The recipe for borscht I’ll get from a Polish friend, which I won't make because I suck at cooking (that’s why I’m here) but which will end up pinned to my kitchen wall just in case so who knows, a story about faith and grief, a story about lost children, a (top drawer) story about accidentally working on a farm in Jersey with two armed robbers.
On the edge of my vision is the version of me that once walked past a locked Trinity Rooms with a baby in a buggy, knowing not a single soul, and here is the version of me that turned up ten years later with a crowd of friends and a brass band to dance round an effigy of a local genius loci.
So I guess I’m saying you should come along, on Christmas Day.
The doors will be open, here and at Paganhill. Mother Christmas is readying her bag of toys, and the piano is tuning up for the carols after lunch.
Before then, the Trinity Rooms needs all of us. Give it your money if you have some to spare. And if you don't, it still needs you - and more importantly, you still need it.
If you are reading this and feeling like the world feels hopeless, and nothing you do will change anything anyway, then let me show you what the Trinity Rooms has shown me: that is not true.
Wherever you are in the world, whether you know this place or not, it is important. What happens here can happen anywhere.
Emma Kernahan
We can all wake up on Christmas morning to a better future of our own making. If you like, you can go and listen to this podcast — Through the Window, about what has happened at the Trinity Rooms this year.
I mean it’s not like it will make you cry or anything. Or if you feel like it, you can open your window and shout ‘you there boy! what day is it?’ and throw coins at passersby to get you a turkey, but in my experience that’s a sub optimal turkey delivery system and besides it generates some complaints on the local WhatsApp, so to be honest I would recommend throwing your coins at the Trinity Rooms via the magic of the internet instead!
Come and join us in spirit, or in person. We’ll be looking out for you. And if we turn our heads to the window at just right moment, who knows, we might catch a glimpse of those other ghosts, those shades of all the Christmases still to come.
There they are, their faces pressed up against the glass of 2025, watching us cheering in our paper hats as we all, collectively, flip the lights back on for good.
Emma Kernahan, who writes as @crappyliving on instagram, is co-Director of Dialect Writers, and this autumn has been touring the South West as one third of the mythical parish council, Lost Mythos (@lost.mythos)
Amplify Stroud is supported by Dialect rural writers collective. Dialect offers mentorship, encouragement and self-study courses as well as publishing.
You can find out more at https://www.dialect.org.uk/
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