What do you think Christmas meant to the Narnians?
Posted: Dec 24, 2016 3:49 pm
It's Christmas Eve, and suddenly I got to thinking: what did the Narnians think about Christmas?
Was it mostly a seasonal holiday for merrymaking and gift exchanging, with the focal point being the arrival of Father Christmas and his gift-giving? In a sense, kind of like people in our world who celebrate Christmas in more of a secular way, focusing on the general themes of the holiday instead of the birth of Christ? (Kind of hard to imagine anything being secular in a magical world like Narnia, though.)
On the other hand, since King Frank and Queen Helen probably shared Christmas traditions with their children, do you think that elements of the Christmas story survived in Narnia? There's something wonderfully eerie about someone telling the story of the first Christmas on a winter's night in Narnia, literally a world away from where it happened. I get goosebumps thinking about it!
I feel like this question is a bit of a rabbit hole and that, like a lot of things in CoN, Lewis didn't intend for his readers to reason at length about it... but it's still fun to speculate.
Was it mostly a seasonal holiday for merrymaking and gift exchanging, with the focal point being the arrival of Father Christmas and his gift-giving? In a sense, kind of like people in our world who celebrate Christmas in more of a secular way, focusing on the general themes of the holiday instead of the birth of Christ? (Kind of hard to imagine anything being secular in a magical world like Narnia, though.)
On the other hand, since King Frank and Queen Helen probably shared Christmas traditions with their children, do you think that elements of the Christmas story survived in Narnia? There's something wonderfully eerie about someone telling the story of the first Christmas on a winter's night in Narnia, literally a world away from where it happened. I get goosebumps thinking about it!
I feel like this question is a bit of a rabbit hole and that, like a lot of things in CoN, Lewis didn't intend for his readers to reason at length about it... but it's still fun to speculate.