Holly was guided to remorse by an adult: that’s what’s supposed to happen. Jack, still angry, tries to rip off the head of the replacement pig until his grandfather shouts, “That’s enough!” (CP 39). But after Jack’s grandfather takes her to buy the replacement toy, Holly is able to cry and give Jack a genuine apology. She didn’t seem to care at all about what she’d done” (CP 33). At first, a defiant Holly shows no remorse over throwing out DP: “Holly’s arms were folded, her face was cold and set. Holly and Jack had something enviable that Tom Riddle never did: adults who could contain their destructiveness or guide them toward amends. My guess is that he Obliviated their memories of love and therefore their ability to grieve the loss of it, so they would be more like him, prevented from feeling loss by the belief that he never had anything to lose. Perhaps Amy Benson and Dennis Bishop had cried from grief, and Tom had felt jealous that they had known love in the first place, unlike himself. We know that Voldemort “hardly ever cried” as a baby (HBP 267) and that when baby Harry cried, Voldemort “did not like it crying, he had never been able to stomach the small ones whining in the orphanage” (DH 345). We know that whatever he did was invisible, and they were “never quite right afterward” (HBP 268). This may shed light on the unnamed damage that Tom Riddle did to his fellow orphans, Amy Benson and Dennis Bishop. Jack understands later that Holly threw out his pig impulsively out of jealousy to “punish” him for what she felt was his more loving home life (CP 154). But Holly is too raw to tolerate the younger child’s openly vulnerable dependence on his toy and lashes out. Both Jack and Holly, the stepsister, are suffering from divorce-related turmoil. The relatable, domestic scale of the conflict in The Christmas Pig sheds light on some of the undefined conflicts in Harry Potter. That night, Jack dreams that the new pig, CP, guides him to the Land of the Lost to find out what happens when people lose the things that they love.
Jack stomps on the new pig and tries to tear off its head before his grandparents stop him.
The brand-new toy is such an inadequate replacement that Jack tears apart his room like Harry destroying Dumbledore’s office after the death of Sirius. Jack’s grandfather and remorseful stepsister give Jack a replacement, whom they name Christmas Pig. DP had comforted Jack through his parents’ divorce and his mother’s remarriage. The story starts when Jack’s stepsister throws his stuffed pig, Dur Pig (DP), out of the car window on a motorway. In this book centered around the loss of a treasured toy, she maps out the terrain of all different kinds of loss. With The Christmas Pig, we get to see this storyteller acknowledge divorce as a practical reality and explore how children deal with the effects. But if wizards have divorce lawyers and custody arrangements, we don’t know about it. We see wizard marriages end through abandonment or death – even death under mysterious circumstances, as with Blaise Zabini’s mother’s history. We never do see divorce in the wizarding world.Ĭlearly, divorce was a formative element in the origin story of the Harry Potter books and how the author came to write them, but divorce and shared custody are never mentioned. Events may take place in the mind, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t real. A Voldemort-like villain feels inconsolable rage that other beings have felt enough love to feel loss. A character with the Christmas-tinged name of Holly feels remorse and gets a second chance, recalling the redemptive nature of Harry’s holly wand. The Christmas Pig calls back to many of Harry Potter’s themes. By Lorrie Kim SPOILERS FOR THE CHRISTMAS PIG AHEAD: PROCEED WITH CAUTION
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