I’m not one to get all sentimental about Christmas. I tend to approach it with some degree of indifference, actually. I’m not religious, I don’t need the pressures brought on by this time of the year, and frankly I resent the time-creep that is erasing all sense of passing seasons because the retailers have got to get the decorations on sale before Halloween has even come. I don’t think I’ve reached full-fledged Scrooge levels of anti-Yuletide hostility yet, but Christmas for me simply isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I just don’t buy all the Hallmark-card saccharine.

I was therefore surprised by the depth of my reaction when I recently read a feature article about the World War I “Christmas truce.”

This is one of those unlikely stories that sounds more like a dimly-remembered legend than anything that could’ve actually happened. On a bitterly cold Christmas morning in the first year of the horrific War to End All Wars, 1914, the British troops crouching in the frozen mud of their trenches heard a lone voice singing “Silent Night” in German. This carol was followed by a extraordinary moment of civility between two warring armies. Tired, frightened men laid down their weapons and began to emerge from their holes and trenches, warily at first, then with more confidence. They walked out onto the blasted landscape of no-man’s-land to greet the men from the other side, men who had been trying to kill them only a day before. Germans and Brits spent the day shaking hands, exchanging souvenirs, singing and playing games with their mortal enemies. The spirit of the day, which our modern materialistic excesses have nearly strangled to death, had becalmed a 500-mile-long battlefield.

The next day, those men were back in their trenches, again trying to kill one another. But for a brief moment, there had been peace. And the only reason was because it was Christmas.

I can’t remember when I first heard this story. I’ve always believed it to be apocryphal, the sort of thing that sounds good and tells us how we wish the world really was, but is too far-fetched to have really happened. The notion that two opposing armies would spontaneously cease hostilities, without any orders or authorization from their superiors, seems as quaint a relic as medieval chivalry. A noble ideal, but like so many ideals that flourish in our minds and our hearts, it couldn’t possibly survive in the harsh light of reality. And even if this story did happen way back in 1914, it seems like it could never happen again today, when the world has grown so much more callous, cynical, and cold-hearted. When Christmas has become more an exercise in marketing than anything spiritual, and men definitely do not believe in chivalrous ideas about their enemies.

Maybe it could never happen again. But it did happen once. It is a true story. And, shockingly enough, one of the men who was there on that Christmas Day 90 years ago is still alive.

That’s interesting in and of itself, but I’m recommending that you follow that link and read this story for another reason, and that’s because the message of the Christmas truce is worth hearing. This story kindled in me something I don’t feel much of lately: a sense of hope, a feeling that maybe human beings aren’t simply the most efficient killers in the jungle, and that decency can and does exist even under the worst possible circumstances. If the story of 108-year-old Arthur Anderson can make even an old cynic like myself think about the better angels of human nature and the power of shared cultural meanings, then surely it’s worth your time to give it a look. (Besides, on this laid-back Thursday before Christmas Eve, which I’m sure most people will have off from work, what else have you got to do besides hitting the eggnog bowl again and making yourself sick on that fattening seven-layer dip brought in by the office manager?)

If the Anderson story isn’t enough to keep you occupied for the afternoon, check out this 1927 short story in which James Thurber retells the classic “Night Before Christmas” in the style of Ernest Hemingway. It’s only funny if you’re familiar with Papa’s work, but I’m certain my readers are all classy, well-read sorts for whom that won’t be a problem. 🙂

My favorite passage:

Out on the lawn a clatter arose. I got out of bed and went to the window. I opened the shutters; then I threw up the sash. The moon shone on the snow. The moon gave the lustre of mid-day to objects in the snow. There was a miniature sleigh in the snow, and eight tiny reindeer. A little man was driving them. He was lively and quick. He whistled and shouted at the reindeer and called them by their names. Their names were Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donder, and Blitzen.

 

He told them to dash away to the top of the porch, and then he told them to dash away to the top of the wall. They did. The sleigh was full of toys.

 

“Who is it?” mamma asked.

 

“Some guy,” I said. “A little guy.”

To Hemingway, of course, everyone was a little guy…