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C.S. Lewis Was Too Cynical About Christmas

The Wall Street Journal

December 26, 2025

C.S. Lewis loathed Christmas as a commercial racket almost as much as he loved it as a holy day.

- By Francis X. Maier

He saw mass gift-giving as a kind of annual blackmail, a “symptom of that lunatic condition” of our time “in which everyone lives by persuading everyone else to buy things.” By Dec. 25, given the ritual pressures, the average family looked as if “

This story is from the December 26, 2025 edition of The Wall Street Journal.

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