The C.S. Lewis Institute– Caution: Christmas Ahead

The danger is well-known to us all: being swept up in the materialistic feeding frenzy that increasingly is turning Christmas in America into a pagan holiday. Fifty years ago, this same secularizing drift was afoot in English society. We see evidence of it in Lewis’s correspondence. Writing to a friend in 1953, Lewis said, “I feel exactly as you do about the horrid commercial racket they have made out of Christmas.”1 Two years later, he said, “I’m afraid I hate the weeks just before Christmas, and so much of the (very commercialized and vulgarized) fuss has nothing to do with the Nativity at all.”2 In 1958, Lewis wrote, “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, ‘Oh Lor’! They bring religion into everything. Look—they’re dragging it even into Christmas now!’”3 Lewis described the commercialism of Christmas as one of his “pet abominations.”

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