Having lived in two places now, where it seems that it is always summer, and never midwinter, the concept of a wintry landscape 24x7x365 has it’s temptations. Or it did, anyway, before I spent three years in SoDak, where there are only two seasons: winter and road construction. Winters there are ridiculously cold. You know this because it is possible to walk outside on a sunny winter day, with the thermometer at zero and think it’s positively balmy because at least it’s not windy, or below zero.

But when I read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe for the first time, I was unaware of the temperature differences betwen Sioux Falls and San Francisco, just as I was unaware of the intense amount of Christian mythology within the story. To me, it was just a good story. In some ways, it still is.

The notion of secret worlds is one I’ve always appreciated. My grandfather’s basement held both terror (with it’s Freddy Krueger-esque boiler in the center) and joy (watching my words form wavy lines on the oscilloscope), and there really was a wardrobe in the room I slept in during my endless summers there.

I enjoyed the tales of Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy and their adventures because, no matter what else the Narnia books are, they are great stories, with believable children, who aren’t perfect or beautiful, or gifted with otherworldly powers – they even bicker the way normal kids do – if comedy comes from truth, doesn’t fantasy have to, also?

Of course, when I saw the movie last year, I had to confess to my good friend Bripadme, “I felt really really sick and wrong in the theater, because I was going, “Lucy, adorable, woods, glorious, Mr. Tumnus: So. Damned. Hot.”

Yes, you now know my dirtiest secret. I lust after fauns.