WEBSITE UPDATE
CHRISTMAS 2018 and CHRISTMAS IN WORLD WAR II
Yesterday I was reading the latest political comments, and somebody was wailing, “How can we possibly celebrate Christmas in a terrible world like this?”
The answer is, of course, “It’s always a terrible world, and yet people have somehow managed to keep celebrating it through floods and famines, epidemics and wars. In fact, Christmas is a holiday that’s built to incorporate sadness and loss, memories and regrets, within it,” as the song “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” illustrates, with its “from now on, our troubles will be miles away” and its “through the years we all may be together, if the fates allow.”
That same sentiment is echoed in the song, “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” which was written in the middle of World War II, and which ends with the singer promising that he’ll be home for Christmas “if only in my dreams.”
The soldiers knew how he felt. “It’s about the way a guy feels when the holidays roll around,’ Captain Charles L. Badley wrote in a letter home in 1942, “and it hits him with a jolt that the home folks and the old gang and the Statue of Liberty are thousands of miles, and a war and a victory away, and the going a bit rough in spots, and there are strangers everywhere–and it’s Christmas Eve.”
And so did Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, when he wrote “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.”
So does Henry Wadsworth’s poem, “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day:”
I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old familiar carols play
And wild and sweet the words repeat
Of peace on earth, good will to men.
I thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had roll’d along th’ unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good will to men…
And in despair, I bowed my head:
“There is no peace on earth,” I said
“For hate is strong and mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good will to men…”
He had good reason to despair. The Civil War was in its fourth year when he wrote the poem, with no sign of ending, and he had experienced a personal tragedy, too. His son Charles had been badly wounded in the war, his wife had been fatally burned when her dress caught fire and he had been badly burned when he attempted to rescue her.
And any number of people have quoted that verse of his poem in recent days, when it seems like hate is really strong and likely to win.
But that’s not the end of his poem or his conclusion about the world. Instead, he ends with:
Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The wrong shall fail, the right prevail,
With peace on earth, good will to men.”
Till, ringing, singing on its way
The world revolved from night to day
A voice, a chime, a chant sublime,
Of peace on earth, good will to men.
That’s how I’m feeling this Christmas.
And like the people in this story, from the New York Times in 1941:
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“Across the English Channel (on Christmas Day) German long-range
guns shelled the straits of Dover for fifteen minutes, but in one town villagers contemptuously ignored the shelling and went on singing Christmas carols.”
So,
may you go on singing carols this Christmas
and telling yourself that the wrong shall fail and the right prevail,
and in the meantime, here are some Christmas messages to cheer you from people who know how to
say it much better than I do:
* * * * *
“I have often thought, says Sir Roger, it happens very well that Christmas should
fall out in the middle of winter.”
Joseph Addison
* * * * *
“I do come home at Christmas. We all do, or we all should. We all come home, or ought to come home, for a short holiday– the longer, the better–from the great boarding school where we are forever working at our arithmetical slates, to take, and give, and rest.”
Charles Dickens
* * * * *
“Christmas is the day that holds time together.”
Alexander Smith
* * * * *
“They err who think Santa Claus comes down the chimney; he really enters through the heart.” Mrs. Paul M. Ell
* * * * *
“Just for a few hours on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, the stupid, harsh mechanism of the world runs down and we permit ourselves to live according to untrammeled common sense, the unconquerable efficiency of good will.”
Christopher Morley
* * * * *
And finally, from Hazel Horn, a WASP in World War II:
“It was Christmas 1943, and all five of us in our bay were far from home. We were women Air Force pilot trainers at Avenger Field in Texas, and had nearly finished primary training. Everyone in our bay but one had received her Christmas presents from home. It looked as though I would have nothing to open on Christmas morning for the first time in my life. But one of my baymates went to the PX and bought me a small bottle of cologne, so I would not be left out. Her kind gesture made my day.”
And:
“We knew the penalty for disobeying an order, but this was Christmas, and we felt there was a higher order in effect for this special day. We got up and went over to some POWs (who were serving us dinner) and wished them a merry Christmas. We did not know if they understood English, but they knew our meaning and wished us ‘Frohliche Weihmachten’ in return.”
Happy holidays, everybody!
And a New Year full of peace on earth and goodwill toward everybody!
Connie Willis