Biblical and Theological Commentary on Letters from Father Christmas
(avg. read time: 2–5 mins.)
This collection of letters was written to Tolkien’s children John, Michael, Christopher, and Priscilla from 1920 (when John was three) to 1943 (when Priscilla was fourteen). Since these are letters written to children telling amusing, fantastical stories about life in the North Pole with Father Christmas, the North Polar Bear, and a growing cast of characters and races (including Goblins and red and green Gnomes), it is unsurprising that there is not a lot of interest for our focus in this series of commentaries. This is not exactly the setting for catechesis like the Tolkiens and their church would have been responsible for. That obviously would not have been in line with Tolkien’s tastes anyway (see here and here). It is more interesting for its storytelling, characterization (including the different writing styles and fonts Tolkien adopted to represent different characters), artwork, and emotionally poignant statements like this from the last letter to Priscilla on Christmas 1943:
A very happy Christmas! I suppose you will be hanging up your stocking just once more: I hope so for I have still a few little things for you. After this I shall have to say ‘goodbye’, more or less: I mean, I shall not forget you. We always keep the old numbers of our old friends, and their letters; and later on we hope to come back when they are grown up and have houses of their own and children. (emphasis original)1
Still, there are elements of interest to note for our purposes, mostly for allusions to Christian praxis than for biblical links per se. One, this whole exercise exemplifies how Tolkien approached a matter I have addressed elsewhere of how to incorporate Santa Claus (if one so wishes) in a manner appropriate for a Christian celebration of the Christmas season. Deception is not involved, particularly since these letters continue to be addressed to the children even after they grow past typical ages of children with literal belief in Father Christmas/Santa Claus.
Second, Father Christmas on multiple occasions refers to himself as “Father Nicholas Christmas.” This is an acknowledgment of the Christian origins of this character when he writes in the letter from Christmas 1930 to the Tolkiens about “my father, old Grandfather Yule, and why we were both called Nicholas after the Saint (whose day is December sixth) who used to give secret presents, sometimes throwing purses of money through the window.” St. Nicholas of Myra was a Greek bishop in Asia Minor. People knew him for his powerful prayers, as miracles became associated with his intercessions (so that one of his names is St. Nicholas the Wonderworker [Thaumaturgos]) and for his generosity in giving gifts of money to the poor. His manner of giving secretly (particularly at night) was a practice of Jesus’s teaching in Matt 6:3–4 to keep one’s left hand from knowing what the right hand is doing so that the Father who sees what is done in secret will give reward. In these ways and others, he demonstrated his identity as a dedicated disciple of Jesus whose generosity extends from the root of Jesus’s own. Indeed, it was his more ordinary activity in acting for the good of those near him, especially the poor, and his characterization as your friendly neighborhood saint that has made him one of the most persistently and pervasively respected saints, even among Protestants who otherwise eschew the veneration of saints.
Third, as with the Ghost of Christmas Present in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol having X number of iterations, Father Christmas’s age is tied to the first Christmas of Christ’s birth. The first reference to this matter comes in the Christmas Eve 1923 letter to John (six years old at this point), when he says, “I am nineteen hundred and twenty four, no! seven! years old on Christmas Day.” The “no! seven!” marks a correction made in a different color in the original letter. Of course, this is part of the amusement of a figure so old that he forgets just how old he is. But it also fits with what was already a popular notion of when Jesus was born (thanks in large part to the work of Emil Schürer), as opposed to earlier tradition. While the age of 1924 would correspond to 2 BCE (or 3 BCE if he is not rounding up), 1927 corresponds to 5 BCE (or 6 BCE if he is not rounding up), which is in line with popular scholarly claims that Jesus was born somewhere between 7 and 4 BCE, which I have addressed in this series. Interestingly, later letters give him an age closer to the crossed-out date rather than the corrected one, as he tells John and Michael in a letter on Christmas 1925 that he is “one thousand nine hundred and twenty-five years old,” which would place his date of birth in either 1 or 2 BCE, depending on when one imagines the letter to be written. He is then vaguer in his last reference in a Christmas Eve 1934 letter to Christopher, where he says, “I really can’t remember exactly in what year I was born. I doubt if anyone knows. I am always changing my own mind about it. Anyway it was 1934 years ago or jolly nearly that.”
Fourth, there are other references to an ecclesial calendar for days besides Christmas. I have already mentioned one of them with the reference to the Feast of St. Nicholas on December 6. Multiple other letters refer to St. Stephen’s Day (including the letters from December 23 1931; December 23 1932; December 24 1935; and Boxing Day 1938). This is a feast set the day after Christmas, and on a couple occasions Father Christmas tells the children of a party on that day. There is also one case of referring to All Saints’ Day in the December 21 1933 letter.
There are many editions of this work, and to attempt to get around the problems of page number reference with this many versions, I will simply reference the date.