C.S. Lewis Was Too Cynical About Christmas

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 “