Here are my notes for my interview with Ruth Jackson on The C. S. Lewis podcast (Part I || Part II | Part III)…
Lewis’ (changing) view of Christmas
My relations to my father help to explain (I am not suggesting that they excuse) one of the worst acts of my life. I allowed myself to be prepared for confirmation, and confirmed, and to make my first Communion, in total disbelief, acting a part, eating and drinking my own condemnation. As Johnson points out, where courage is not, no other virtue can survive except by accident. Cowardice drove me into hypocrisy and hypocrisy into blasphemy. It is true that I did not and could not then know the real nature of the thing I was doing: but I knew very well that I was acting a lie with the greatest possible solemnity.
C. S. Lewis, Surprised By Joy (Chapter 10)
The birth of Christ is the central event in the history of earth — the very thing the whole story has been about.
C. S. Lewis, Miracles (Chapter 14)
Christmas in his books
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
When we first see Mr. Tumnus, we’re told “What with the parcels and the snow it looked just as if he had been doing his Christmas shopping”.
When Lucy visits for tea, Mr. Tumnus tells her that the White Witch makes it “Always winter and never Christmas”. This phrase is repeated multiple times until Mr. Beaver announces that her magic is failing, signalled by the arrival of Father Christmas:
…on the sledge sat a person whom everyone knew the moment they set eyes on him. He was a huge man in a bright red robe (bright as holly-berries) with a hood that had fur inside it and a great white beard that fell like a foamy waterfall over his chest. Everyone knew him because, though you see people of his sort only in Narnia, you see pictures of them and hear them talked about even in our world—the world on this side of the wardrobe door. But when you really see them in Narnia it is rather different. Some of the pictures of Father Christmas in our world make him look only funny and jolly. But now that the children actually stood looking at him they didn’t find it quite like that. He was so big, and so glad, and so real, that they all became quite still. They felt very glad, but also solemn.
C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and, the Wardrobe (Chapter 10)
Father Christmas gives presents to the children (“tools not toys”) and ensures that there’s merry-making, in a truly British way:
…he brought out …a large tray containing five cups and saucers, a bowl of lump sugar, a jug of cream, and a great big teapot all sizzling and piping hot. Then he cried out “A Merry Christmas! Long live the true King!”
C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (Chapter 10)
The Last Battle
“In our world too, a Stable once had something inside it that was bigger than our whole world”
C. S. Lewis, The Last Battle (Chapter 13)
Mere Christianity
Echoing the Early Church Fathers (Irenaeus, Athanasius etc.) he makes the bold statement that:
The Son of God became a man to enable men to become sons of God.
C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 5)
The Eternal Being, who knows everything and who created the whole universe, became not only a man but (before that) a baby, and before that a foetus inside a woman’s body. If you want to get the hang of it, think how you would like to become a slug or a crab.
C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (Book IV, Chapter 5)
Miracles
In the Christian story God descends to reascend. He comes down; down from the heights of absolute being into time and space, down into humanity; down further still, if embryologists are right, to recapitulate in the womb ancient and pre-human phases of life; down to the very roots and seabed of the Nature He has created.
C. S. Lewis, Miracles (Chapter 14)
The central miracle asserted by Christians is the Incarnation. They
C. S. Lewis, Miracles (Chapter 14)
say that God became Man. Every other miracle prepares for this, or exhibits this, or results from this.
Reflections on the Psalms
Interpretations which were already established 122in the New Testament of course have a special claim on our attention. We find in our Prayer Books that Psalm 110[9] is one of those appointed for Christmas Day. We may at first be surprised by this. There is nothing in it about peace and good-will, nothing remotely suggestive of the stable at Bethlehem. It seems to have been originally either a coronation ode for a new king, promising conquest and empire, or a poem addressed to some king on the eve of a war, promising victory. It is full of threats. The “rod” of the king’s power is to go forth from Jerusalem, foreign kings are to be wounded, battle fields to be covered with carnage, skulls cracked. The note is not “Peace and good-will” but “Beware. He’s coming”.
C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms (Chapter 12)
Poetry
Among the oxen (like an ox I’m slow)
I see a glory in the stable grow
Which, with the ox’s dullness might at length
Give me an ox’s strength.Among the asses (stubborn I as they)
I see my Savior where I looked for hay;
So may my beast like folly learn at least
The patience of a beast.Among the sheep (I like a sheep have strayed)
C. S. Lewis, The Nativity
I watch the manger where my Lord is laid;
Oh that my baaing nature would win thence
Some woolly innocence!
“What Christmas Means to Me”
This is found in the collection, God in the Dock. He begins the essay by distinguishing the three things which go by the name “Christmas”. Obviously, there’s the religious festival, but there’s also the popular holiday, which has complex historical connections with the religious festival. Lewis says it’s “merrymaking and hospitality”, something of which he very much approves. But he then distinguishes a third meaning to “Christmas”, what he calls “the commercial racket”. This he condemns it, arguing that it’s more pain than pleasure:
Long before December 25, everyone is worn out—physically worn out by weeks of daily struggle in overcrowded shops, mentally worn out by the effort to remember all the right recipients and to think out suitable gifts for them. They are in no trim for merrymaking… They look far more as if there had been a long illness in the house.
C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock (“What Christmas Means to Me”)
He also argues that it’s mostly involuntary:
The modern rule is that anyone can force you to give him a present by sending you a quite unprovoked present of his own. It is almost a blackmail. Who has not heard the wail of despair, and indeed of resentment, when, at the last moment, just as everyone hoped that the nuisance was over for one more year, the unwanted gift from Mrs. Busy (whom we hardly remember) flops unwelcomed through the letter box, and back to the dreadful shops one of us has to go?
C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock (“What Christmas Means to Me”)
He also complains that the gift exchange is mostly of gaudy and useless gadgets. He asks:
Have we really no better use for materials and for human skill and time than to spend them on all this rubbish?
C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock (“What Christmas Means to Me”)
He really does rather go into “grumpy old man” mode. However, I do want to point out that he wasn’t a complete scrooge. He says in his letters:
I send no cards and give no presents except to children.
C. S. Lewis, Collected Letters
“Xmas and Christmas: A lost chapter from Herodtus”
These same arguments are made in a fictionalised form in another essay in that book:
And beyond this there lies in the ocean, turned towards the west and north, the island of Niatirb [Britain, backwards… Americans may call this Ac-ir-e-ma…]… they have a great festival which they call Exmas [EX-MAS]… every citizen is obliged to send to each of his friends and relations a square piece of hard paper stamped with a picture, which in their speech is called an Exmas-card…. And because all men must send these cards the market-place is filled with the crowd of those buying them, so that there is great labour and weariness.
C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock (“Xmas and Christmas”)
But having bought as many as they suppose to be sufficient, they return to their houses… when they find cards from any to whom they also have sent cards, they throw them away and give thanks to the gods that this labour at least is over for another year. But when they find cards from any to whom they have not sent, then they beat their breasts and wail and utter curses against the sender; and, having sufficiently lamented their misfortune, they put on their boots again and go out into the fog and rain and buy a card for him also…
…when the day of the festival comes, then most of the citizens, being exhausted with the Rush, lie in bed till noon. But in the evening they eat five times as much supper as on other days and, crowning themselves with crowns of paper, they become intoxicated.
He then compares this with another festival…
…the few among the Niatirbians have also a festival, separate and to themselves, called Crissmas [CRISSMAS], which is on the same day as Exmas. And those who keep Crissmas, doing the opposite to the majority of the Niatirbians, rise early on that day with shining faces and go before sunrise to certain temples where they partake of a sacred feast. And in most of the temples they set out images of a fair woman with a new-born Child On her knees and certain animals and shepherds adoring the Child. (The reason of these images is given in a certain sacred story which I know but do not repeat.)
C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock (“Xmas and Christmas”)
He goes on to say that he has asked one of these temple priests why they keep Crissmas on the same day as Exmas. The priest replies:
It is not lawful, O Stranger, for us to change the date of Crissmas, but would that Zeus would put it into the minds of the Niatirbians to keep Exmas at some other time or not to keep it at all. For Exmas and the Rush distract the minds even of the few from sacred things. And we indeed are glad that men should make merry at Crissmas; but in Exmas there is no merriment left…
C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock (“Xmas and Christmas”)
How Lewis celebrated Christmas
For Christmas dinner in Malvern in 1947, in addition to the traditional turkey, Warnie cooked boiled potatoes, Brussels sprouts, soup, and a pudding. They enjoyed two bottles of Burgundy, one of Commandaria and a half bottle of gin.
In 1952, Lewis’ future wife, Joy Davidman came for Christmas. We have a letter she sent to Chad Walsh where she described it:
An enormous turkey, and burgundy from the Magdalen [College, Oxford] cellars to go with it; I stole a wineglassful to put in the gravy, and they thought it was practically lèse majesté [treacherous barbarity] — till they tasted the gravy.
Joy Davidman, Letters
Christmas drinks would have no doubt also included sherry and Vat 69.
Just a hurried line … to tell a story which puts the contrast between our Feast of the Nativity and all this ghastly ‘Xmas’ racket at its lowest. My brother heard a woman on a bus say, as the bus passed a church with a crib outside it … ‘They bring religion into everything. Look, they’re dragging it even into Christmas now’.
C. S. Lewis, Collected Letters
Christmas Reading
- The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
- God in the Dock essays essays: What Christmas means to me and A Lost Chapter from Herodotus
- In Miracles, the chapter entitled “The Grand Miracle”
- Lewis wrote an Introduction to Sister Penelope’s translation of On the Incarnation by St. Athanasius.
- The Man Born to be King by Dorothy L Sayers
