Some Thoughts on Christmas

This is a wonderful quote by C.S. Lewis. Published in the magazine "The 20th Century" in Dec 1957. (the punctuation etc. might be a bit off since I transcribed it from a recording.) Enjoy!

Three things go by the name of Christmas. One is the religious festival; this is important and obligatory for Christians, but as it can be of no interest to anyone else I shall naturally say no more about it here. The second – and it has complex historical connections with the first, but we needn’t go into them – is a popular holiday and occasion for merrymaking and hospitality. If it were my business to have a view on this I should say that I very much approve of merrymaking, but what I approve of much more is everybody minding his own business. I see no reason why I should volunteer views as to how other people ought to spend their own money and their own leisure among their own friends. It’s highly probable that they want my advice on such matters as little as I want their’s.

But the third thing called Christmas is unfortunately everybody’s business. I mean of course the commercial racket. The interchange of presents was a very small ingredient in the older English festivity. Mr. Pickwick took a cod with him to Dingleydell. The reformed Scrooge ordered a turkey for his clerk. Lovers sent love gifts. Toys and fruit were given to children. But the idea that not only all friends, but even all acquaintances should give one another presents, or at least send one another cards, is quite modern and has been forced upon us by the shopkeepers. Neither of these circumstances is in itself a reason for condemning it. I condemn it for the following reasons:

One, it gives on the whole much more pain than pleasure. You have only to stay over Christmas with a family who seriously tries to keep it, in it’s the third or commercial aspect, in order to see that the whole thing is a nightmare. Long before December 25^th 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 gives for them. They are in no trim for merrymaking; much less, if they should want to, to take part in a religious act. They look far more as if there had been a long illness in the family.

Two, most of it is involuntary. The modern rule is that anyone can force you to give him a present by sending you quite an unprovoked present of his own. It’s almost blackmail. Who as 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 letterbox and back to the dreadful shops one of us has to go.

Three, things are given as presents which no mortal ever bought for himself – gaudy and useless gadgets and novelties because no one was ever fool enough to make their like before. Have we really no better use for materials and human skill and time than to spend them on all this rubbish?

Four, the nuisance – for after all during the racket we still have all our ordinary and necessary shopping to do and the racket trebles the labor of it. We are told that the whole dreary business must go on because it is good for trade. It is in fact merely one annual symptom of that lunatic condition of our country, and indeed the whole world, in which everyone lives by persuading everyone else to buy things. I don’t know the way out, but can it really be my duty to buy and receive masses of stuff every winter just to help the shopkeepers? If worst comes to worst I’d sooner give them money for nothing and write it off as charity. For nothing? Why better for nothing than for a nuisance.