Father Christmas in Narnia
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis is one of the best loved and bestselling children’s books of all time. When Lucy finds her way into Narnia by way of the magic wardrobe, she finds a world of snow and ice and soon discovers that Narnia is under the wicked reign of the White Witch who has made it always winter and never Christmas.
The first sign that the witch’s spell is beginning to break is the sudden arrival of Father Christmas.
“Come on!” cried Mr. Beaver, almost dancing with delight, beckoning the children to follow him. “Come and see! This is a nasty knock for the Witch! It looks as if her power is crumbling.”
Unsure of what has made Mr. Beaver so excited, the children scramble up the steep bank of the valley behind him.
“Didn’t I tell you that she’d made it always winter and never Christmas? Didn’t I tell you? Well, just come and see!”
As the children reached the top of the hill, they saw a sleigh, and reindeer with bells on their harness. On the sleigh sat someone “whom everyone knew the moment they set eyes on him”, a huge man dressed in a robe as bright red as holly berries, with a fur-lined red hood “and a great white beard that fell like a foamy waterfall over his chest”.
“I’ve come at last,” Father Christmas proclaims. “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.”
Lucy felt a “deep shiver of gladness” at hearing Father Christmas’s words, especially those about Aslan being on the move.
After Father Christmas has given gifts to each of the children to help them in the battle against the evil of the witch, he is ready to depart as suddenly as he had arrived. “Merry Christmas!” he shouts, cracking his whip. “Long live the true King!”
The arrival of Father Christmas in the midst of the endlessly bleak midwinter is a sign that the witch’s power is beginning to falter and that Aslan is indeed “on the move”. This becomes apparent to the witch as the snow begins to melt. “This is no thaw,” says one of the witch’s slaves. “This is Spring. What are we to do? Your winter has been destroyed, I tell you! This is Aslan’s doing.”
Aslan, the figure of Christ in the story, is the antithesis of the witch and the antidote to her poison. She brings a winter in which it is never Christmas; he brings Christmas and the return of spring. She brings the chill of death in the absence and banishment of the holy; he brings the warmth of life in the presence of the sacred.
Earlier in the story, when Mr. Beaver had also asserted that “Aslan is on the move”, Peter, Susan and Lucy had the same leap of the heart which seems to suggest the presence of divine grace: “once again that strange feeling – like the first signs of spring, like good news, had come over them”. They experience the resurrection of life which comes with the spring; and, more than that, the “good news” of the Gospel itself. The impact of this “good news” within any good story was emphasized by J. R. R. Tolkien in his discussion of eucatastrophe, the sudden joyous turn in a story, in his famous essay “On Fairy Stories”:
[T]his joy … is a sudden and miraculous grace; never to be counted on to recur…. [I]t denies … universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world….
The arrival of Father Christmas and the news that Aslan is “on the move” signify the “sudden and miraculous grace”, the gift of the “fleeting glimpse of Joy”, which is the divine presence itself within the story; the Good News; evangelium. It is the Good News of Christmas itself.
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