"Narnia is a mongrel thing, and so is Christmas"
On Narnia and Christmas: two things created out of a conglomeration of elements...but how old are they? An article from the NYTimes claims that MOST of our ideas of Christmas are...Victorian! December 18, 2008 Op-Ed Contributor It’s a Narnia Christmas By LAURA MILLER EVERY Christmas, I re-read C .S. Lewis’s novel “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.” The holiday seems like the ideal time for an excursion into my imaginative past, and so I return to the paperback boxed set of “The Chronicles of Narnia” that my parents gave me for Christmas when I was 10. For me, Narnia is intimately linked with the season. I’m not alone. In Britain, stage productions of “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” are a holiday staple, for good reason. The book rests on a foundation of Christian imagery; its most famous scene is of a little girl standing under a lamppost in a snowy wood; and Father Christmas himself makes an appearance, after the lion god Aslan frees Narnia from an evil witch who decreed ...