It may help us to meet a little girl named Lucy, a character in the delightful story by C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Lucy found herself in the magical land of Narnia in the company of a Faun named Mr. Tumnus, who told her about the White Witch.
"The White Witch? Who is she?" Lucy asked.
And Mr. Tumnus answered, "Why, it’s she that makes it always winter . . ."
"How awful!" said Lucy, who became quite troubled and distressed about this White Witch. Later in the story, Lucy described the dreadful White Witch to her brother Edmund.
"She is a perfecty terrible person," Lucy told Edmund. "And she has made a magic so that it is always winter in Narnia -- always winter and never Christmas."
Young Lucy was understandably disturbed! Can you blame her? You and I would probably be just as disturbed if our land was in danger of losing Christmas and being stuck forever in frigid winter. Maybe that’s exactly our predicament! Maybe we live in a world more like the land of Narnia than we want to admit. Maybe, like Narnia, our world has a "White Witch" or two just waiting end our Christmas joy and leave us in perpetual winter. It may well be a kind of "White Witch" who robs us of our vision of a velvet, starry night in Bethlehem where a Holy Child was born, and leaves us with only frigid, dark, starless, winter nights.