The winter was harsh, the ground frozen, nature raw. Soldiers have spent almost six months in the muddy, sodden and now icy trenches of France and Belgium. Comrades were disappearing, fighting was escalating. On 7 December 1914, Pope Benedict XV proposed an official temporary cessation of hostilities so that the exhausted men on both sides of the front line could celebrate Christmas. It was unanimously rejected by all those involved in the First World War, but only at the highest level. Soldiers, who could hardly bear the torments of everyday life, wanted a break from the harsh reality, but 25 December 1914 spontaneously went down in history as the day of the “Christmas Truce”, or the day when we witnessed the last time cavalierism and humanity in the midst of the bloody storm of war.
There is no one common description of what happened on those days. The temporary truce, which lasted 48 hours in some places and until 1 January 1915 in others, was neither ordered nor organised. In each unit, regiment or battalion the story began differently, but what most of them have in common is that boys and men who had been shot and killed from their trenches only a short time before were now in a no-man’s land that was tearing them apart.
“First the Germans sang one of their songs and then we sang ours,” Graham William reported what was happening in their house on Christmas Eve. When the British voices joined together in O come, all ye faithful, their German opponents were immediately drawn to them, only to sing the same song in the original Latin, Adeste fideles. “I thought: well, this is really something very unusual – two nations singing the same Christmas carol in the middle of a war.”
The song also brought Christmas to the icy winter in the north of France. On Christmas Eve, 26-year-old farmer’s son Edgar Aplin began to sing with his remarkable tenor voice. After a few verses of Tommy Lad, he heard German voices from the enemy trenches: “Sing it again, Englishman. Sing Tommy Lad again.” He gladly complied.
He wrote home: “We had four days rest and were not in the trenches. We returned on 23 December to rest some of our regular troops.” On the day before Christmas it was business as usual, there was shooting and shooting again, but only “until the evening when we sang some Christmas carols and old familiar ones. Our friends from the other side immediately started cheering loudly and finally we started shouting over to the Germans. Those opposite us mostly speak English.
Shortly afterwards, when it got dark, we suggested that if they would send one of their men halfway between the two trenches (275 metres), we would do the same. We both agreed not to shoot.
So they approached each other, each carrying a torch, and when they met, they exchanged cigarettes and ‘lit up’. The cheering on both sides was extraordinary, I will never forget it. Not long afterwards, others came out of the trenches. My friend met an officer and the officer told him that if we did not shoot for 48 hours, they would not shoot either. They were as good as their words.
On Christmas Day, there was hardly anyone in the trenches. It is almost impossible to describe the day as we experienced it here, and I can assure you that we all enjoyed this peaceful time.” Edgar Aplin survived the war after he was wounded in March 1915 and was transported to England. After recovering, he did not return to the front but trained new officers.
He often spoke of the Christmas truce, but also of the torments he had already written about in his letters. “I am afraid that no one at home can imagine what the real Tommy has to suffer for it.” Or: “Some of our ditches are now knee deep in water. Tommy sleeps very little, but smiles and is ready for anything.”
He didn’t complain if he could, but he had no reason to at Christmas 1914, nor did many other soldiers. In some places the Germans came out of their trenches with signs on their arms saying: ‘You no shoot, we no shoot‘ or ‘You no shoot, we no shoot’. The British were cautious at first, but when they were convinced that the Germans meant business, the fun began.
A British soldier is said to have met his German hairdresser, whom he used to see before the war. Now he had given him a quick haircut to celebrate Christmas. “I remember the silence, the mysterious sound of silence. It was a moment of peace in a terrible war,” Alfred Andreson of the Fifth Battalion recalled, so used to the rattle of the guns that the silence frightened him.
The soldiers exchanged cigarettes and Christmas snacks they got from home. General Walter Congreve was part of the British command in northern France, stationed near Neuve Chapelle. In a letter to his wife, he reported how he had spent Christmas Day: first he went with two of his battalions to mass in a huge factory, then to lunch, and then to the trenches of the Rue de Bois.
“There I encountered extraordinary circumstances – that morning a German shouted from his trench that he wanted a day of truce and that he would come out if the others came. One of our own rose very cautiously above cover. He saw that the German had done the same. They both went a little further and finally the men were there all day walking around together, exchanging cigarettes and singing songs. Officers and soldiers alike came out of the trenches. The German colonel himself spoke to one of our centurions.
My informant, one of the soldiers, said that he had a good day. That he ‘smoked a cigar with the best marksman in the German army, who was only 18 years old. They say he killed more of our men than the other 12 put together, but now I know where he is shooting from and I hope we will mow him down tomorrow.’
I sincerely hope they will. The two nearby opposing battalions were firing all day and I hear that it was the same higher up in the north. The first battalion was playing a football match with the Germans who were opposite them – the next two regiments were again firing at each other.
I was invited to see the Germans for myself, but I held back because I thought they might not be able to resist the general.” They probably wouldn’t have been interested in football, unless some of them also saw this spontaneous temporary truce as a subversive way of undermining the morale of the troops.
The rejected hand of reconciliation
In some places, no-man’s land was more than 30 metres wide. Soldiers could listen to their opponents’ conversations, smell their food. For the commander of the British Second Corps, General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien, such close proximity represented “the greatest degree of danger” to the morale of the troops. He firmly forbade his subordinate commanders any “friendly contact with the enemy”.
On 5 December, he issued a circular warning that “troops in trenches very close to the enemy’s can easily succumb to the ‘live and let live’ mentality if allowed to do so”. In 1930, the British soldier Murdoch M. Wood confirmed his words when he spoke of the Christmas truce: “I came to the conclusion then, and have maintained it ever since, that we would never fire a single shell again if it depended on us.”
Adolf Hitler was a corporal at the time, but he did not share the joy of his comrades. He reportedly said, “During war, such a thing should not happen. Have you no German sense of honour?”
Members of the British Hertfordshire Regiment, which was part of the Guards Brigade, whose members were highly professional, obviously had it. They spent their days in the trenches outside the French village of Festubert, near the Rue de Bois. They arrived in France in November, went straight to the battlefield, had a little rest and returned to their trenches on the day before Christmas.
Before dawn, the Germans set up lanterns on the edges of their trenches, some 140 metres from the British trenches, and began to shout towards the British trenches. “We were ordered to fire like this. And we did,” recalled Corporal Clifford Lane, as they shot out all the German lanterns that illuminated the darkness.
“The Germans did not return our fire. They continued to celebrate. They ignored us and had a great time. We persevered in our wet trenches and tried to make the best of the situation. They offered us the hand of reconciliation, but in the Protection Brigade discipline was at the highest level in the whole army. Its members could not be expected to fraternise, so we were ordered to fire,” Lane continued. He later sincerely regretted that they had not taken part in the Christmas truce like the other troops. “It would have been a really good experience.”
So on Christmas Day they ate bread and jam, cheese and cold ham alone, except that they no longer had two companions with them. A few hours after they had refused the proffered hand of temporary reconciliation, Percy Huggins, 23, went to his guard post, some 20 metres from the enemy trench. His head was suddenly pierced by a shot from a German sniper.
Before that, he sent home his last letter. He thanked his mother for the pudding, saying he was looking forward to it, even if he had to eat it cold. “I long for the day when this terrible conflict will be over. You think war is terrible, but the imagination cannot go far enough to picture the horrors of war that can be seen on the battlefields. They are indescribable, and I pray that this will be the last war that ever was.”
His comrades and 36-year-old Commander Tom Gregory were furious at the news that he had fallen on Christmas Day. Gregory set out to replace him. His gaze combed the icy plain. He was looking for a sniper. He wanted revenge. He found him. He took his life with one shot.
He continued his march of revenge. He saw the second sniper. He was about to put pressure on the rooster when it hesitated. The sniper had seen him only a moment before. The British used the tragic deaths of two of their soldiers to examine the importance of snipers in the war effort.
But two thirds of the men who were on the battlefield at the time did have a unique and unforgettable Christmas. No later than the first of January 1915, fighting resumed everywhere. The following year there was no more spontaneous Christmas truce. The men were now not only exhausted, they were numb and stiff. They did not care to celebrate and felt no sympathy for the enemy. The First World War had been cruel and bloody. It killed 15 million people.
Silent Night of the Christmas Truce
At least at the beginning of the war, a song brought a sense of normality to men, but every Christmas Eve, millions of people around the world should take a moment to calm down to Silent Night, which was born in 1816 in the mind of Joseph Mohr, a parish priest in the Austrian village of Maraphar. No one knows whether he showed the verses to anyone at the time, but he certainly took them with him to his new rectory in Obemdorf, although it was not until 24 December 1818 that he rushed to his friend Franz Gruber, a music teacher in a neighbouring village, and asked him to set them to music immediately so that Silent Night could be sung at midnight mass that same evening to the accompaniment of his guitar.
Karl Mauracher, who used to come to the village to repair the organ, heard it only a few years later. He liked it and took the text with him. With him, the song took its first step into the world, and with two travelling singing families who thought it was part of the folk tradition, the second. The first family is said to have sung Silent Night in December 1832, and seven years later the Americans were introduced to it when another family sang it across the ocean.
In their performance, it sounded slightly different from its original setting, but it quickly became a favourite with the people. Soon it was sung by millions. Who is the composer of the melody? It has been attributed to Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart and other famous composers. Then they heard that the text about the birth of Jesus had been set to music by an unknown music teacher in less than a few hours. They did not want to believe it.
Franz Gruber was not sufficiently prominent to be recognised as the author, but it was agreed that he was unknown. Gruber’s rights were only recognised a few years ago, when one of his music transcriptions was authenticated because the original had been lost.
No one doubted that these words were the fruit of Joseph Mohr’s labors at the time of his death in 1848, even though he was not only “unsightly” but also poor as a church mouse – he gave everything he earned to the care of the elderly and the education of the children in his district.
White Christmas
“This is not only the best song I’ve ever written, it’s the best song anyone has ever written,” composer Irving Berlin explained about his song White Christmas to his assistant Helmy Kress when he commissioned him to write it. He couldn’t do it himself. He could neither write nor read music, and he played the piano decently, but not perfectly. But he had an ear that could unerringly detect whether Kresa had caught the exact melody that was echoing in his head.
The poem “White Christmas” is said to have begun to awaken in him long before 8 January 1940, when he had it written down. Some say it was when he was separated from his family for work and longed to be near his loved ones. Others say that the poem is so sentimental and nostalgic because, at least subconsciously, he wanted to return to the time when his son was still alive during the festive season: he died the day after Christmas in 1928.
Still others believe it was really inspired by a mockery of the sentimentality in which Americans wallow during the festive season. The irony is suggested by the first verse, which opens with the sun shining and the trees turning green and the palm trees swaying there in Beverly Hills, which is meant to mock the emotional experience of a white Christmas in a place without snow.
When he heard how the song sounded in Bing Crosby’s rendition, Irving Berlin threw out the first verse. It has now become the best-selling Christmas song of all time and the most recorded song in history. It has been covered by some five hundred people, including in Yiddish and Swahili. It was the best-selling single in all genres until Princess Diana’s death, when it had to give way to an adaptation of Candle in the wind, originally written by Elton John for Marlyn Monroe.
White Christmas was a long time in the making and was “born” under duress. Berlin had to write the music for Holiday Inn, a film in which Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire compete for a girl in a nightclub open only on holidays. For other holidays he could easily hear the songs in his head, but he had trouble with Christmas.
He was a Jewish immigrant from Russia and did not celebrate Christmas as a child, although he did not have a Jewish upbringing for very long. After his father’s death, he ran away from home at the age of eight and made a successful living begging until he joined a street singer and sang on his own. Passers-by noticed his gift for satire, but he got a job and by the age of 18 had already made a name for himself as a songwriter. His career slowly rose until he became an American superstar who is now credited with writing 812 songs, 451 of which became hits.
He wrote the song White Christmas once, Bing Crosby had to record it three times. The first, a 1941 radio recording, has not survived. The second, from 1942, when the film Holiday Inn hit the screens, is said to have worn out, so he had to sing the song again in 1947. To make it as close to the original as possible, the same musicians who had played five years earlier were brought together, but Crosby made no effort: he sang it twice and rushed back to the golf course.
The 54-word song became an overnight hit. In 1942, it won the Academy Award for Best Song, the year American soldiers spent their first winter on the battlefields across the Atlantic. They were tormented by homesickness, and the memory of happier days was revived. White Christmas perfectly captured their longing and blended with the emotions on the battlefield, even if it had a strong rival – God Bless America. Irving Berlin wrote this too, but revised the 1918 original when it was published in 1939. Americans were suffering from the deprivations of the recession and needed something to give them a momentary escape from the ills of everyday life.
White snowflake
The irony, say White Christmas experts, is that the most famous Christmas carol, which is considered to be the quintessential American secular anthem, was written by a Jew, but there are always problems with carols. For example, the authorship of the most frequently performed song in December, the indispensable White Snowflake.
It is said to date back to the 1950s, although one version of its origin says that it was born in 1936 in the mind of Mario Kinel, a Croatian journalist, translator, lyricist and composer of entertainment music, born in 1921 in Suško. At the age of fifteen, he was inspired by the sounds of Italian songs by unknown names and the wonder of the sight of snow suddenly turning the seaside town white.
The song never became a hit in Croatia, but it found fertile ground in Slovenia. The members of the Ljubljana jazz ensemble Optimisti released it on Jugoton in 1957 and called it Silently Falling Snow on a small record. In parentheses they wrote its original title, Sniježi, and gave Mario Kinel as the composer and Aleksandar Skala as the lyricist.
Nevertheless, some still insist that the words were put on paper by a parish priest in Zasavje, after he fell in love and left for abroad because of a broken heart. Others again believe that the author of the lyrics is Alojz Zavratnik from Zagorje ob Savi, while the “official” descriptions of the song mention Božidar Wolfang Wolf, who signed the 1993 adaptation, as the author of the lyrics once, and Mario Kinel, who died in 1995, as the author of the lyrics the second time.
In any case, the song has been covered many times, but none has ever equalled the one recorded by the band Veter in 1987, and it is an indispensable, gently sombre part of the joyous festive mood.
Rudolf the Redhead
There is no doubt that the father of Rudolph the Red-nosed Rudolph is 34-year-old Robert L. May, an employee of the Montgomery Ward retail chain. Ward’s stores used to give books to children at Christmas, but in 1939 they realised that it would be cheaper for them to print their own story, especially if it was written by one of their employees. Robert L. May was chosen as the writer.
It was a foggy evening and Father Frost was worried. Would the eight reindeer pulling his sleigh find their way to the children’s homes? He thought of Rudolph, an outcast from the reindeer community. He was born with a glowing red nose, so the other reindeer taunted and stung him. His parents found his difference as beautiful as the normality of his peers, and lovingly raised their son to be a confident deer who never suffered from feelings of inferiority. When Grandfather Frost invited him to join his crew and light the way with his shining nose, he finally became exceptional.
Robert L. May presented the story to his superiors and they were not impressed. Rudolph’s red nose reminded them too much of drunkenness, but for Christmas 1939 the controversial reindeer was just given to children. Over the next seven years, more than six million copies of the story were distributed among them.
In 1947, May acquired the copyright from Ward and began marketing the story. Rudolph was now officially the ninth member of the crew of reindeer that had been named in 1823 by Clement C, a New York schoolteacher, in his poem A Visit from Saint Nicholas (A Visit from Grandfather Frost). The fastest is Dasher, the mildest is Dancer, the strongest is Prancer, the most beautiful and powerful is Vixen, Comet brings happiness and miracles to children, Cupid brings them love and joy, and Donder, sometimes called Dunder, and Blitzen, who was Blixem in the original, also do their job.
Rudolf is not among them, of course. He only really came to prominence when Johnny Marks, Robert L. May’s brother-in-law, set a slightly adapted story about him and the song became the second best-selling song of all time.
Space Christmas
But in 1965, astronauts Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford did not have Rudolf in mind on their way to Earth orbit. They were on board the Gemini 6 spacecraft. In space, they had to meet up with their Gemini 7 colleagues.
Such a complex manoeuvre has never been done before. The ground control centre was nervous, but ten days before Christmas, the two crews found each other and, for the first time in history, came so close with their capsules that they almost touched.
The Control Centre was impressed. Everything had gone according to plan, and now the two capsules just had to return home safely. They were following their journey when, on 16 December, they heard the voice of Stafford. He was all out of his depth, announcing to the control centre:
“We have an object in front of us. It looks like a satellite. It’s flying from north to south, probably in a polar orbit… It looks like it’s about to reappear …. You must let me take this thing … I see a control module and eight smaller modules at the front. The pilot of the control module is wearing a red suit.”
Then there was silence. The engineers at Cape Canaveral waited anxiously to see what would happen next. The minutes ticked by. What did they see? Impossible, that they could have been crossed by earth creatures. Suddenly, they heard a sound so familiar to them, but now so extraterrestrial: the tune of Jingle Bells, the most popular rival to White Christmas. Schirra and Stafford played it on the mouth organ and accompanied it with the jingle of five bells.
Their call to the centre was a pure Christmas prank. Wally Schirra came up with the idea, Stafford later revealed. “He knew how to play the accordion. We practised two or three times before we went, but of course we didn’t tell the guys on the ground … We never had a plan to sing, because I can’t catch a note at any price.”
Tom Stafford also remembered very well the tension in the voices on the ground. When he spoke of seeing something in front of him, it grew bigger and bigger. “When we finished the song, Elliot See [from the control centre] breathed a sigh of relief and just said, ‘You two are going quite too far.'”
The bells and mouth organ were later donated to the Washington Space and Aeronautics Museum, where they are on display as part of the astronauts’ personal equipment. In their day, they could only take a handful of personal items with them, so they usually took small souvenirs into space.
It was unusual that they chose musical instruments, despite the fact that music regularly echoes in space. The Control Centre often woke the astronauts with carols, but they had never before had a live Christmas “concert” broadcast from space.
Three years later, astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and William Anders had to spend the night before Christmas on board Apollo 8 orbiting the Moon. Originally, they were supposed to test the lunar module in Earth orbit, but as preparations were delayed, NASA changed its mind and they set off for the Moon.
With Apollo 8, they became the first three people to leave the Earth’s gravitational field, the first to orbit the Moon, the first to see the whole Earth from space and the first to see the dark side of the Moon. But they are mainly remembered for the TV report after they entered lunar orbit on Christmas Eve.
Viewers first saw images of the Moon and Earth from lunar orbit on the screen, then three astronauts read a Christmas message. They ended with the still famous words, “Merry Christmas and God bless you all, all of you on good Earth.” This is one of the broadcasts with the most television viewers in history.
Christmas is forbidden!
Of course, no one remembered that as late as 1659, Christmas was still forbidden in some places, such as Boston. Between 1659 and 1681, if its inhabitants were caught in a festive mood, they were fined five shillings.
In the years that followed, Christmas was allowed in America, but it was so unimportant that after the American War of Independence, fought between 1775 and 1783 between Great Britain and its thirteen northern colonies, Congress did not even take a day off to celebrate it. Instead, it met for the first time on Christmas Day in 1789, and Christmas Day was not declared a public holiday for almost a century.
It has not been a problem in Europe, especially in Germany, where fir trees were decorated before the advent of Christianity. The first Christmas tree thus appeared in Strasbourg in the 17th century, and was also introduced to Americans quite early on, although only in Pennsylvania. Around 1820, German immigrants settled there and brought with them the tradition of decorating the Christmas tree. The custom spread throughout the state, but not beyond its borders.
Elsewhere on the new continent, the Christmas tree was not recognised until an American newspaper published a picture of Queen Victoria of Britain and Prince Albert of Germany decorating a fir tree in 1848. Before her marriage to Albert, Victoria had not done so, but after 1840, both she and her subjects decorated the tree.
Christmas is still celebrated differently in different countries, but in Christian countries it is all celebrated on 25 December. But Jesus’ birthday is not in the Bible. Most historians believe that Jesus was probably born in the spring because the Bible describes shepherds tending animals. But when the Catholic Church decided to make Jesus’ birth an official feast day in the 4th century, the Pope of the day chose 25 December. Two days earlier, pagans had finished their celebrations in honour of the god Saturn.
