Jack’s (C. S. Lewis) War On Xmas

To say Jack’s relationship with Xmas was tendentious is to understate it. Even in his youth, elements of the season niggled at him. He did not care for the parties and dances, which included gift giving, feasting, drinking, and dancing. The dancing he especially loathed. In a November 1913 letter to his father, he begged him to not host a party that year and to put to death the hopes of co-conspirators, who wished for Papy to squander money on a function that offered no return.[1]

Jack did not object to merriment or the exchange of gifts. He cherished the Xmas Boxes his father sent him while away at school. One year he requested Part I and II of Wagner’s Ring Cycle. Another year he asked for Rolleston’s Myths and Legends of the Celtic Race. He paid this practice forward as well. In his adult life, besides filling letters to his godchildren with rudimentary sketches, he sent a little something for an Xmas Box during “Xmas season.”[2]

The War on Xmas Begins

Nonetheless, by the late 1940s, Jack had begun to distinguish the Xmas rush from Christmas, and he was quite free in expressing these feelings to intimates. In a 1948 letter to Ruth Pitter, he declared, “If the horrible commercial racket and general nuisance of ‘Xmas’ allows it, I hope you will have a happy ‘Christmas’.”[3] The following year he offered his first sustained critique of Xmas to Vera Matthews:

I couldn’t agree with you more about the commercial rush of ‘Xmas’ as distinct both from the Christian festival of Christmas and the old Germanic feast of Yule. This idiotic exchange of cards which have nothing to do with the Nativity by people who care nothing about Our Lord—this maddening interchange of presents which no one wants to receive—the monstrous annual campaign of advertisements with their venal geniality—the aching feet of the shopper and the shop-girl—the waste of the world’s wealth in producing all this rubbish of gadgets and ‘novelties’—faugh! Giving toys to children and food to the hungry as you do!) is very well: but two grown-ups exchanging a patent cigarette lighter (a dozen boxes of matches wd. be far more use) against a patent calendar (that doesn’t work) seems to me abysmal.[4]

Over years of correspondence, the two repeatedly commiserated about commercialized Xmas.

Jack’s scroogery and grinchiness found its way into numerous Xmas season correspondence, and it was the seasonal uptick of correspondence that fed his curmudgeonliness. He bemoaned devoting too much time to letter writing. To Mary Willis, in December of 1955, he wrote:

I seem to have been writing Christmas letters most of this day! I’m afraid I hate the weeks just before Christmas, and so much of the (v. commercialised & vulgarised) fuss has nothing to do with the Nativity at all. I wish we didn’t live in a world where buying & selling things (especially selling) seems to have become almost more important than either producing or using them.[5]

This sort of lament became a common refrain with intimates. To Joan Lancaster he claimed, “Can’t write properly—there are dreadful mails at present—I write letters all day—it spoils Christmas completely.”[6] This dilemma so troubled him that he began covenanting to not exchange letters during the Christmas season with “real friends” like Dom Bede Griffiths and Jocelyn Gibb. He went so far as to argue in a December 1962 missive to Alistair Fowler:

Thanks v. much for the book, but if we’re both alive next Christmas don’t do so no more! I have a non-aggression pact about Christmas Boxes with all my real friends. Leave that to relations! St Augustine, by the way, said that Christmas presents were ‘diabolical’![7]

He had only discovered Augustine’s perspective weeks ago, as a letter to Edward Allen indicated. Sadly, he was both mistaken on his attribution to Augustine and he narrowly missed living until next Christmas, for he passed away that coming November.[8]

The Niatirbian Xmas

Jack took his war on Xmas public with the publication of an allegory framed as a missing chapter of Herodotus’s history. “Xmas and Christmas: A Lost Chapter from Herodotus” first appeared in Time and Tide on December 4, 1954.[9] The allegory described the practices of the Niatirbians, who inhabited Niatirb, an isle approximately the size of Sicily. These people celebrated a great festival called Exmas, which involved 50 days of ritual preparation known as the Exmas Rush.

The Niatirbians rushed about purchasing and sending to loved ones Exmas-Cards. Because all were compelled to practice this ritual, the marketplaces were constantly crowded. You had to reciprocate when you received a first-time Exmas-Card, so you’d go back out to the marketplace to buy a card for this new recipient, adding to your already agonizingly long and perpetually growing list of annual Exmas-Card recipients.

Gift giving played a large role in Exmas too, but the shopkeepers trumped up the people into buying useless and ridiculous gifts they never would use. Old, poor, and miserable men walked about the marketplace disguised in false beards and red robes. These poor fellows, the merchants, and shoppers were so anxious, hurried, and exhausted by this ritual that foreigners, observing the Exmas ritual, would think the people had already suffered some great calamity, rather than merely trying to avert one by appeasing the merchant-gods of Exmas.

On Exmas Day, worn out Niatirbians slept until noon. Then they dawned paper crowns, exchanged gifts, feasted and drank late into the night, until they passed out from intoxication. They awoke the next day with guilt from all their avarice and gluttony during the past weeks.

According to Jack, a remnant of Niatirbians practiced devotion to Crissmas, a concurrent festival best summarized in his own words:

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.)[10]

Sadly, devotion to the Exmas Rush commonly distracted the faithful few from their reflection on sacred Crissmas. Jack’s allegory about the Niatirbians vividly explains the allergy he felt towards Xmas and made apparent in his letters.

The Narnian Christmas

One might rightly wonder if some of Jack’s Christmas woes were a consequence of his most wildly successful book, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. While ostentatiously dedicated to his godchild, Lucy Barfield, Jack fashioned and gifted the world of Narnia to his godchildren everywhere. He used this fairytale world to re-enchant them and retell in lore, what his dear friend J. R. R. Tolkien coined as the eucatastrophe of human history, the incarnation of Christ.

In the first installment of Narnia, two sons of Adam and two daughters of Eve entered into and became instrumental in rescuing Narnia from a wicked witch that had enchanted the land with a spell that made it “always winter but never Christmas.”[11]

As the epic unfolded, there was a scene where the children and their guides, Mr. and Mrs. Beaver, thought that they had been discovered by the witch. But it turns out that they had been visited upon by Father Christmas. Jack’s depiction of Narnia’s Father Christmas made for a stark contrast to the poor, old fellows he portrayed in the Niatirbian allegory:

He was a huge man in a bright red robe (bright as hollyberries) with a hood that had fur inside it and a great white beard that fell like a foamy waterfall over his chest…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.[12]

Father Christmas’s first words to the stunned party assured them that the evil witch’s wicked, wintery spell upon Narnia had been broken.

“I’ve come at last,” said he. “She has kept me out for a long time, but I have got in at last. Aslan is on the move. The Witch’s magic is weakening.”[13]

He then imparted gifts to each of the three children present, for one had been a traitor to the evil queen. These gifts were described as serious tools of protection for the great battle ahead. Father Christmas then presented the party with a large tray of settings and a meal for them to share, as a proper Christmas tea, before their journey continued. Father Christmas’s parting words encapsulated everything Jack wished for his readership to understand about the real purpose of Christmas: “Merry Christmas! Long live the true King!”[14]

Jack may have suffered from the same malady of humbug that plagued Scrooge and the Grinch, but like those two literary characters, he too had been changed. His change was not some mere moral transformation, but one that redefined his relationship with the One, True King. So, to him, his war on Xmas made good sense. Anything that distracted or led people away from celebrating the birth of Jesus and participating in a relationship that redefined their being was worthy of warring against. Jack had been enchanted by the deeper magic and the one true myth about Jesus Christ’s coming, and he wanted others to have that same experience.

Interestingly, much of Jack’s Christmas related correspondence, in the years following the 1950 publication of this book, were from young and old readers around the world—sending Christmas gifts, well wishes that referenced the book’s storyline, or asking more questions about the world of Narnia. To many readers, the wintery context and the episode with Father Christmas made the book a Christmas book, especially since the witch put Narnia under a spell where it was “always winter but never Christmas.” Matters certainly were not helped by how the book was published in autumn, just “in time for the all-important Christmas gift market,” as George Sayer put it in his biography, Jack: A Life of C. S. Lewis.[15]

That Jack’s war on Xmas, at least partially was a problem of his own making, does not matter so much as his discerning initiative to distinguish the two worlds he perceived, Xmas and Christmas. Was Jack the origin for the U. S. evangelical culture war known as the “War on Xmas” during the coming decades? It seems unlikely that evangelical ire towards Xmas found its inspiration from the beloved writer of Narnia, though the consonance in perspective is uncanny. Regardless whether we choose to wage a war on Xmas and Father Christmas (Santa) or not, we learn from Jack’s repurposing of the season and character of Father Christmas, in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, that this season and that character may yet still serve a purpose to point to irrefutably true realities that are of immeasurable worth for children everywhere.

[1] The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume 1, 41.

[2] The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume 1, 40, 81. The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume 2, 634.

[3] The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume 2, 893.

[4] The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume 2, 993.

[5] The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume 3, 744.

[6] The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume 3, 745.

[7] The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume 3, 1464.

[8] The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume 3, 1369, 1387, 1461.

[9] Time and Tide, vol. 35 (4 Dec. 1954), 1607; “Xmas and Christmas: A Lost Chapter from Herodotus” in God In the Dock (Eerdmans, 1979), 301–303.

[10] “Xmas and Christmas” in God in the Dock, 303.

[11] The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in The Chronicles of Narnia: The 7-Book Collection (Harper Collins, 2008), 174.

[12] The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, 235.