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Our earliest description of Christmas from C.S. Lewis is a bitter one. The year was 1922. As usual, C.S. Lewis and his brother Warren spent the holidays with their widowed father in his big house outside Belfast.

"It was a dark morning with a gale blowing and some very cold rain," Lewis reported in his diary. Their father Albert awakened his two sons, both in their midtwenties, to go to early Communion service. As they walked to church in the dawn light, they started discussing the time of sunrise. Albert irritated his sons by insisting that the sun had already risen or else they would not have any light. He was an illogical and argumentative man.

Saint Mark's church was intensely cold. Warren wanted to keep his coat on during the service, and his father disapproved. "Well, at least you won't keep it on when you go up to the Table," Albert warned. Warren asked why not and was told that taking Communion with a coat on was "most disrespectful." Warren took his coat off to avoid an argument. Not one of the three Lewis men had any interest in the meaning of Communion. The two sons hadn't believed in Christianity for years.

"Christmas dinner, a rather deplorable ceremony, at quarter to four, Lewis continued in his diary. After dinner the rain had stopped at last, and Albert urged his two sons to take a walk. They were delighted to get out into the fresh air and head for a pub where they could get a drink. Before they came to the pub, however, some relatives drove by on the way to their house for a visit and gave them an unwelcome ride right back home.

After too much sitting and talking and eating and smoking all day in the stuffy house, Lewis went to bed early, dead tired and headachy. He felt like a flabby, lazy teenager again. It had been another bad Christmas.

In 1929 Albert Lewis suddenly died of cancer. There would be no more coming home for Christmas. Within a couple of years of their father's death, both Warren and C.S. Lewis privately made some major shifts in their ideas about religion. They were separately moving toward Christian faith.

It was 1931. In Shanghai, where he was serving as a British military officer, Warren got up at 6:30 on Christmas morning. There was bright sun, frost on the ground, and what Warren called a faint keen wind. For the first time in many years Warren went to church to take Communion. He was deeply excited about it.

Warren couldn't help thinking about the old days when he had attended Christmas Communion at home in Ireland. "The kafuffle of the early start, the hurried walk in the chill half light, Barton's beautiful voice, the dim lights of Saint Mark's and then the return home to the Gargantuan breakfast-how jolly it all seems in retrospect!" It hadn't seemed jolly at the time. Warren felt great sorrow about the past, but his sorrow was outweighed by gladness and thanks that he was once again a believer in the Christmas story.

On that very day, Christmas of 1931, C.S. Lewis sat down in Oxford to write an eight-page letter to Warren. He began by warning that because of his teaching duties he had done, read, and heard nothing for a long time that could possibly interest Warren. Then he proceeded to write one of his usual entertaining letters full of humor and ideas and bits of new. In the middle of the letter he mentioned that it was a foggy afternoon, but that it had seemed springlike early that morning as he went to the Communion service. That is how he admitted the big news that he had taken Communion for the first time in many years.

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December (Web-only) 1999, Vol. 43