Lucinda Breeding

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince opened in theaters last Wednesday. Director David Yates and screenwriter Steven Kloves had the unenviable task of whittling 652 pages into a movie that runs about 2 1/2 hours.

Their scalpels sharpened, the team went about paring the rich but unessential details from the novel, leaving Harry, now in his sixth year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, with a mission. He has to get as much information about the evil Lord Voldemort as possible before he can fulfill the prophecy made about him when he was just a baby.

But before our hero can go on to battle the darkest wizard who ever lived, Harry has to have Christmas.

Warner Bros. Pictures

From left, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Matthew Lewis, Daniel Radcliffe and Bonnie Wright appear in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

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Throughout the Harry Potter book series, Christmastime is of supreme importance. In Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Harry receives his ever-useful invisibility cloak on Christmas. He gets it from an anonymous source, and the cloak grows in importance as he matures. In the second book, Harry and his friends stay at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry on Christmas Day, and learn that one of their chief suspects isn’t the culprit wreaking evil on the school by opening the chamber of secrets. In Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, he receives another important talisman on Christmas: the marauder’s map, a magical map that shows the exact, real-time locations of every single person within the school’s grounds. In the fourth book, the Yule Ball brings teenage romance into the picture; in the fifth, Harry and his friends spend the day in the wizarding hospital and learn more about the lurking evil in their world.

Christmas Day in the sixth book is a big deal. It’s filled with tension for his host family, the Weasleys. But it’s also the day that Harry tells the Minister of Magic — think of it as the wizarding world’s president — that his allegiance is not to politics, but to his headmaster, Albus Dumbledore, who plays the role of an unpopular prophet. In the final book, Harry visits his parents’ graves on Christmas Eve. He heads home to learn that, no, he really can’t go home again.

Author J.K. Rowling has never claimed that her record-breaking book series is a Christian allegory. For the author, the story is about the eternal struggle between good and evil, sin and redemption. For Rowling, this is a story everyone knows, regardless of their religion.

And yet there are the symbols of Medieval Christianity: an ancient sword, a phoenix, an enchanted mirror and a magical grail. Rowling is British and was weaned academically on literature about man’s quest for virtue and godliness. And she is, after all, a member of the Anglican church.

She might not have set out to allude to the life and trials of Jesus, but her stories are enriched by the old symbols of classical Christianity. And in her novels, Christmas is always important.

In the sixth book, Christmas means something. Hope and a divine sort of ambition are born within this boy who didn’t earn his lot in life. It was fate that decided that the most evil wizard of all time would mark him for death. Harry decides to accept the prophecy made about him, even if it means torture and dying. In the sixth book, Christmas means everything. It’s a day in the novel that brings together all the portent and possibility of the Christian liturgical calendar’s winter arc.

What seals it? Well, there is no Christmas in the final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Not really, anyway. In the final book, Harry is in the wilderness with his best friends, forced into fasting and tempted more than once to give up. He gets a short moment for a bittersweet family reunion at his parents’ graves on Christmas Eve, but then terror chases Harry into exile. Christmas Day is no celebration when Harry is in the wilderness.

Christmas is there, simple and profound, in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. It’s a Last Supper of sorts, with a family heavy with dread and love and a big but scary promise hiding in the shadows. It gives the story a universal meaning.

There is a whisper of Rowling’s Anglican upbringing in her books, to be sure, but Christmas is mostly a time for the hero of this story to meet the imperfect nature of himself and others, and to puzzle through the sacrificial nature of love.

That’s something readers of any faith can relate to.

LUCINDA BREEDING can be reached at 940-566-6877. Her e-mail address is cbreeding@dentonrc.com.