When people ask Paul O’Neill why Trans-Siberian Orchestra created a trilogy of Christmas rock operas, the group’s founder borrows the words of a 19th-century master.

“Dickens wrote a lot of books about subjects larger than life: Industrial Revolution, ‘David Copperfield’; French Revolution, ‘A Tale of Two Cities,’ ” he said in a recent teleconference, “but he wrote five books about Christmas, and when a journalist asked why five books about Christmas, he said: too large a subject to take on in one book.”

In breaking down the TSO’s trilogy, he says “Christmas Eve and Other Stories,” the group’s 1996 debut, “is basically how it has the same effect on human beings all around the world.” “The Christmas Attic,” from 1998, is “about how it’s been doing it for centuries.” And then 2004’s “The Lost Christmas Eve,” his favorite, is about how “there’s something about Christmas that allows you to undo mistakes you never thought you could undo.”

The current tour, stopping at Consol Energy Center on Sunday, is themed to the hybrid “The Ghosts of Christmas Eve,” produced for a Fox TV special in 1999 when the network asked the group to fill an hour slot.

“They asked us if they could film the band for an hour doing ‘Beethoven's Last Night,’ which we had just completed. I said, ‘If you give me an hour, I'll give you a mini-movie.’ They're like, ‘Do you have a script?’ and I’m like, ‘I’ll write it tonight.’ I just quickly scripted together this little thing, where a 15-year-old ends up breaking into this old Vaudeville theater. She’s a runaway. There, she's discovered by the caretaker, who uses the ghosts and the spirits from the theater to turn her life around. Thank god Fox liked it.”

Ossie Davis played the caretaker, and Jewel and Michael Crawford were cast as the ghosts.

“It was only supposed to run once and never again, but it did so well, Fox ran it multiple times,” he said. “Then it’s basically run on various stations ever since. The DVD has gone multi-platinum. I’ve always liked it. It’s a little gem. It’s fun to watch it at home with your family, but, live, there’s an excitement where you pick up the energy of the person in front of you, to the left of you, to the right of you. We decided if we were ever going to do ‘The Ghosts of Christmas Eve’ live, it was this year or not at all, so we decided to go for it.”

Tucked into the second set are a handful of songs from the ensemble’s new sixth album, “Letters From the Labyrinth,” which for the first time is neither a holiday album or a rock opera.

One of the songs, “Forget About the Blame,” sung on the album by TSO member Robin Borneman and Halestorm’s Lzzycq Hale, originally was written as a love song, but it took on new meaning for Mr. O’Neill when the group played a festival in Wacken, Germany.

“There were quite a few people I bumped into there from the Middle East,” he said. “Also, while I was over there, we were watching the news. I had a bunch of Iranians say this is all the Iraqis’ fault. The Iraqis are saying blame Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabians are like, blame the Shiite militias. The people living in Syria, they don’t care about blame. They just want it to stop. What’s happened in the past is the past. You can study it to correct the future, but it’s not going to change the past. The people living there, they don’t care who’s to blame.”

Although it’s not obvious from the lyrics, the mournful piano ballad “Not the Same” was inspired by the story of Amanda Todd, the Canadian teen who was driven to suicide in 2012 after being cyberbullied.

“The other kids,” he said, “instead of wrapping themselves around her, or protecting her, they continued to bully her. A huge crowd of them beat her up, left her beaten up outside the building. You can use the arcs to change how people view certain things and whether certain things are acceptable. To me, bullying, of any sort, but especially with kids, is unacceptable, on any level. I don't even like the word ‘bully,’ it kind of romanticizes it. You have a lot of people who say, ‘I'm the biggest bully on the block’... They’re not bullies. In actuality, they’re cowards.

“I was actually once in a school, this was a long time ago, where these two kids started fighting and I pulled them apart, and one of the teachers said, ‘Paul, it’s OK. You have to understand bullying is a part of life.’ And I’m like, ‘No, it’s not. It’s unacceptable, and that’s the first thing the kids have to learn.’ ”

Another new song in the set, “The Night Conceives,” is a hard rocker in the Aerosmith vein about the cover of darkness.

“I've always been fascinated by night,” Mr. O’Neill says. “Night is where the fringes of society can feel safe. At one point of my life I used to live in Hell’s Kitchen, when I was younger, and at night you would see the winos, the schizophrenics, the drug addicts. They would come out because they felt safety there. Here we give her a human form where she watches out for those who are on the fringe of society.”

Supplying the gritty vocal on the album and here as well, as part of the East Coast ensemble, is Kayla Reeves.

“[She] joined TSO when she was 17,” he says, “and we got her out of the foster care system in Texas. Now she’s been with us for like six years — and where the heck did that go? — but she puts an emotional bite and passion to that song where you believe every word she says.”

It’s all wrapped in one of the biggest and most garish touring productions on the road, complete with every stage effect imaginable.

“If you have a great song, that’s great,” he says, “but if you have great production where the lights and the lasers and the pyro and everything else is going off in time, off of one nervous system, it helps to take it to a whole other level. One of the reasons I tend to like the over-the-top production is it breaks down the wall between the band and the audience. It kind of makes it all one.”

And every year, he likes to ramp it up a little more.

“Human beings, we’re strange creatures. We like the comfort of the familiar, but we like the excitement of something new and different. Every year we feel the pressure to do that. It’s all about the audience, to take everybody in that arena on a journey of their imagination where they're not in that arena. They escaped and they feel emotions they never felt before. They leave that building recharged.”

Scott Mervis: smervis@post-gazette.com; 412-263-2576. Twitter: @scottmervis_pg.

First Published: December 24, 2015, 5:00 a.m.