Always Winter and Never Christmas

“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.”

Seen in Part and Parcels

One of his hands, as I have said, held the umbrella: in the other arm he carried several brown paper parcels. What with the parcels and the snow it looked just as if he had been doing his Christmas shopping. He was a Faun. And when he saw Lucy he gave such a start of surprise that he dropped all his parcels. "Goodness gracious me!" exclaimed the Faun.

Everyone knows—we are told at least seven times over—that Narnia under the spell of the White Witch has long been stuck in bleak midwinter without ever arriving at the feast of Christmas. The Witch, of course, believes her sorcery to be working, and so does everyone else. Lucy will repeat Mr. Tumnus’ sorry account of the calendrical curse on the land first to Edmund and then to Peter and Susan. The reader will rejoice when Father Christmas is permitted to take his own sledge into the land and when as a sign of Advent the melting snow becomes a torrent and the wicked works of the Witch begin to become undone.

Lucy’s innocent observation, however, that the Faun appears to have been doing his Christmas shopping, indicates or signifies that the Witch’s domination, though effectual in some sense, is never fully real. The Witch has no title to the kingdom (a thought which adds to the sickness in the belly of the fallen Edmund). But this means far more than that her claim on Narnia is an attempt to usurp the Name of the Lion—or perhaps her attempt means far less than she believes. Her terrors indeed are real to those who suffer under them, and yet all her efforts are vain and impotent. The Witch may try to drive out Nature with a pitchfork, or the Author of Nature with a magic wand, but it all keeps coming back in. She can’t really stop Christmas from coming—and she never has—although it may be hard to see things that way. 

The turn of the era was not an especially pleasant time to be a faun or fox or beaver or man in the Land, not least because the fact that it was the turning of the era, the hinge of history, the irruption of the end times into the middle of things, was not apparent to anyone in particular until it was manifestly so. The records of the intertestamental period are more than sufficient to depress the sympathetic reader who can enter into that historical moment. How much longer will there be silent prophets, mutilated priests, and false kings, Roman overlords, Idumean pretenders, and Hellenizing sellouts? How many more abominations will come into or go out of the holy city? Before the Dayspring from on high visited us, we were a people sitting in darkness, some indeterminate number of years B.C.

Christmas will come, whether tyrants and sinners will it or not, and we ought not to see only hypocrisy in the signs of its coming. There is something irrepressible about the feast, though not because there remains some spark of warmth within us by nature. Even Tumnus, the worst faun since the beginning of the world, is doing his Christmas shopping. Why? Christ Jesus, after all, came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost. Goodness gracious me!

Always Winter Now

In one corner there was a door which Lucy thought must lead to Mr. Tumnus' bedroom, and on one wall was a shelf full of books. Lucy looked at these while he was setting out the tea things. They had titles like The Life and Letters of Silenus or Nymphs and Their Ways or Men, Monks and Gamekeepers; a Study in Popular Legend or Is Man a Myth?

Apart from the natural-yet-unnatural grace of Christmas, comforts great and small turn sour. The trials of a year or of a lifetime or of an era become unmoored, at least in our hearts and minds, from the good purposes of God. Of course, God’s good gifts don’t turn out to have really been bad all along, and our suffering or oppression doesn’t turn out to have been good in itself. But in the meantime that we don’t recognize as a middle, between the testaments whose revelation we cannot anticipate, in seeming to wait for nothing in particular, all seems lost. Even the soul-refreshing stories of the past turn to bitterness and gall. And here is Mr. Tumnus, packages and all, with his little library and his songs.

The Faun’s first gloomy reminder that it is always winter now is the sad addendum to his wonderful tales of life in the forest. It really was a wonderful tea for Lucy and Mr. Tumnus, we are told, as though we might have thought it a false or mediocre one otherwise (or might misremember it in light of the coming betrayal). After toast and toast and more toast, variously dressed and in such ways as English children at least might find scrumptious, Lucy tires of eating but desires to listen: midnight dances, hunting parties, feasting and treasure-seeking, Nymphs and Dryads and Fauns and Dwarfs. For Lucy, these are even more delightful, in their proper place, than sardines on toast.

We are not quite told whether Mr. Tumnus himself has borne witness to such things. He has wonderful tales, the narrator says coyly, and his shelf full of books seems to be where he has gotten them from. (At the time of the hunt for the White Stag and the close of the reigns of the Pevensies, Tumnus is middle-aged and has grown, as we all must in time, decidedly stout.) But whether these are his personal memories or those of his people, they do him no good now, however much he wishes them to, and however fine they may be in themselves. 

At the start of each new year, the sophomores of New Saint Andrews College are thrust back into the muck and mire of ancient history. Why is there war and, as Herodotus says, “all the other things”? What caused this greatest commotion in Thucydides? Without sight of Christmas and the far side of tedious lectures, painstaking papers, harrowing exams, and other such things, the violence and perversion of antiquity is too much to bear, perhaps. But aren’t there good and glorious things alongside all the tyranny and murder? The first response is to say that this is like asking whether the whole dish is rotten. In the larger sense, and even for the diligent and dedicated student, it is precisely all the goodness and pleasantness in classical history and historiography that turns dreadful.

The music of the ‘strange little flute’ is the music of Silenus and Bacchus and the joys of summertime, and it ought to bring good cheer. Instead, hope becomes despair: the tune which “made Lucy want to cry and laugh and dance and go to sleep all at the same time” is a good tune put to bad ends. The awful mixture is one kind of thing for Lucy and another for Mr. Tumnus. The Faun had been delighted to see a Son of Adam or Daughter of Eve, delighted and melancholic, for reasons that he stops himself from revealing to Lucy and which he can hardly reveal to himself. It looks as though he is a traitor, and it looks as though he has been doing his Christmas shopping.

Just as it is always winter now, the Faun declares that it is no good now. The secret police have already been alerted. The Witch has ruined the old songs, and it is not enough—not nearly enough—to appeal to their redeeming if not redemptive qualities. The memory of the feast is bittersweet; the enforced fast is not consecrated toward any end. Both fast and feast, however, are to be made new, given their times and their seasons, and devoted entirely and without contradiction to the glory of God.

The First Christmas (Again)

"He has not been here! He cannot have been here! How dare you—but no. Say you have been lying and you shall even now be forgiven."

It is easy to forget how much simpler it is to be standing on this side of Christmas, to have read the story already, to be celebrating the holiday again. It is easy to see the tottering and broken-down ruins of ancient tyrannies and see them ruined always. What is remarkable about the ancient Church on the eve of the Incarnation is that whatever the strength of her expectation, she was still doing her Christmas shopping. Self-consciously or in spite of herself, openly or secretly, cheerily or gloomily, she was still found doing something that would look very much like Christmas shopping to a child who might have noticed her.

Years of silence were not simply years of apostasy or years of abandonment, however much rebellion there was and however emphatic the writ of divorce being handed down against Israel. The wait for Emmanuel, for God with us, was not on account of His not already being with us! The Spirit and the Bride say ‘Come!’ because He has and He will. The people were not in darkness because the King of the Land had suffered some setback or because He had been away on more important business. He did not sit in high council with His heavenly advisors pondering long over how, if possible, He might come and save His people.The things which prophets foretold and angels longed to see were indeed coming and were anticipated if only in part. Anna and Simeon and Mary the Mother of our Lord testify to the finest expressions of this holy anticipation.

If the Narnian story is a supposal of the Incarnation in its fullness, one might wonder why or how Christmas predates the story itself. Perhaps it is just that lovably mixed-up world, with its Greek and Roman gods and its Norsemen and its medieval cosmology, that drives us Tolkien-folk to read the Silmarillion again with all the calming or soporific coherence we can manage. The offense of Father Christmas must be addressed, or diverted.

The salvation of the world was never a near thing, and so to complain that the cart (or sleigh) has been put before the horse (or reindeer) is to miss the power of God in, through, over, above, against…history. The central conflict is not a fair fight between two opposing principles, one good and one evil. God is not a man, that he should lie, and there is no enchantment against Jacob nor any divination against Israel. The Witch may try to keep out the other reindeer sleigh; the creche may be driven from the public square. But it was never by the power of the Witch that Christmas was kept out of the world; it was never by the power of the Serpent that the salvation of the world awaited the fullness of time. The Witch’s sorcery avails for a time to keep out the feast, but the war on Christmas is an entirely pathetic affair.

The ancient world has passed away with the coming of Christmas, but it is not all the sociological merits of the religion recognized even by godless historians that makes the feast sweet and glorious. Yes, the Incarnation brings liberty to man and woman and child, equality for slave and free, and recognition of the common humanity of the nations in the kingdom of Christ. But these things are not to be reduced to the general improvement in creature comforts since the onset of the Christian era; they are instead the first glorious presents of that glorious future.

The Incarnation means the renovation of the world, the beginning of the end of the age of winter. The power of the wicked one and of his minions has been, is being, and shall be broken. When students return to their history colloquium in January, they will come to consider all the holy martyrs and confessors who testify to the glory of God, and they will see how the faith spread throughout the world—unevenly, incompletely, and roughly according to human standards and the immediate light of history, but inexorably and truly and boldly.

The present reality of Christ’s kingdom does not eliminate the suffering of the world, which still groans in eager expectation of the new birth. Herod is dead and eaten by worms, and the boys of Bethlehem are ruling among the princes of heaven. Another Herod, less great, is now stripped of all his power, and John, greatest of those born of woman, is clothed in finer things than camel’s hair. The Witch’s desperate pleadings and offers of false forgiveness upon finding out merely that the servant of the Lion has come match well the sort of frantic behavior, the death throes, of the wicked one that must have accompanied the first realization of the forerunner and foretaste of the divine plan. It is a wonder that the Witch, like the Serpent, had recovered enough to foil herself again at the foot of the Cross.

Long before the Witch gets stuck in the mud, indeed from the very beginning of things, the Gospel has gone forth. The serpent’s head was always going to be crushed: lo, his doom is sure! If satanic opposition to the first advent is ridiculous, how much more the attempt to stand athwart the bright red flow from Emmanuel’s veins that washes down to the end of all things, to the culmination but not the cessation of the world.

Always Summer, Always Christmas

"Daughter of Eve," said Aslan in a graver voice, "others also are at the point of death. Must more people die for Edmund?"

At the end of the beginning, Lucy’s cordial, her Christmas gift, brings relief and restoration to Edmund. This is hardly because Aslan has neglected to save Edmund completely from the power of sin, death, and the devil. The sacrifice at the Stone Table and the rising-again accomplish everything, and this Christmas memory returns at the right moment to recapitulate the story. The moment, however, is almost missed, as Lucy looks eagerly to see whether the medicine will take—as though it were in doubt! Aslan “gravely” corrects Lucy, who is briefly “cross” but finally sorry.

As Aslan reminds Lucy, the gift of new life must not stop there at the bedside or graveside even of our brother, of that one we pity despite or because of his treachery. Others must be saved, too; the Land must be rescued. The King goes out conquering and to conquer. The Witch is defeated, but this is hardly the whole tale. Our Christmas gifts are to be set to the great work of the Kingdom, with full expectation that such work will continue until the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.

So that oft-invoked thing, the Spirit of Christmas, must be centered on the Gospel, and not just in the sense of maintaining explicit teaching on the nativity of the Lord in public and in private as we give and open presents or otherwise go about the business of the season. The Spirit is that royal imperative which Jesus will declare out of Isaiah to have descended on himself, “because he has anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he has sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord.”

The Faun had at first concluded that Lucy must have come from beyond the wild woods of the west. This is true enough. With a bit of flourish and more than a little melancholy, Mr. Tumnus understands the girl to have come from the far land of Spare Oom where eternal summer reigns around the bright city of War Drobe. The confusion of names is simple, the confusion of seasons less so. The Faun rightly understands that a place free from the power of the Witch must be an altogether different land. But our world, which stands in the light of the Incarnation and Resurrection, is not yet the world of eternal summer.

The blessings of the harvest are already apparent: laden tables, well-stocked pantries, and all the other things that tend to make middle-age in Middle-Earth an age of stoutness and joviality. The delightful old world and its riches are with us, revived and purged of bitterness. The Resurrection has already taken hold of things. The old stories of knights and ladies and dragons and witches still can make us weep, not now because they reveal to us our low estate only and the wrath deserved for the same, which comes by the light of nature, but because the bright shining Savior reveals his triumph even in these things. The old heroes may still be in the dismal realm of Hades, but they are a joy for us to hear about even as they themselves might continue to refuse entrance into the heavenly city. Classical culture comes to us not sanitized and bowdlerized but in such purity of spirit as was never yet available apart from Christ and Christmas. All things are ours. In the place of drunkenness and shame is feasting and glory before the Lord.

The true eternal summer, the eternal Eighth Day, is really coming, “when the plowman shall overtake the reaper and the treader of grapes him who sows the seed; the mountains shall drip sweet wine, and all the hills shall flow with it.” There is nothing otherworldly or ‘gnostic’ about it. The delightful epiphany of Dionysus, which brightened even through history and memory the dreary oppression of Narnia, will indeed seem pale before the light of the true savior of the world, begotten of the Father, and the sweet music and wine and dancing of the Fauns and Dryads and Nymphs will no longer be melancholic reminiscences but only the first inklings of the world to come.

I will restore the fortunes of my people Israel, and they shall rebuild the ruined cities and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and drink their wine, and they shall make gardens and eat their fruit. I will plant them on their land, and they shall never again be uprooted out of the land that I have given them,” Says the Lord your God.

A Merry Christmas! Long live the true King!