A Christmas truce
This is my most wonderfully troubling time of year. I’m in heaven listening to traditional yuletide music while absentmindedly gazing at lights on our tree. But it’s vexing to be bombarded with Silent Night, Holy Night, from tinny speakers while shopping for tooth paste and dishwasher soap.
Prior to the 18th Century, compared to Easter, Christmas was a relatively minor Christian holiday. Some thought it not proper to commemorate Jesus Christ’s birth close to the winter solstice, when pagans excessively celebrated the beginning of the lengthening of daylight.
Yuletide began morphing into what we have today around the time Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol was published in 1843. That classic story, with its myth of Scrooge, set the stage for today’s prolonged period of gift giving, good cheer and celebrating with friends and family.
I suspect most Christians strike a balance between the secular and Christian parts of the holiday and just enjoy the season. But the commercial-religious tension is exaggerated annually as some conspiracy-theorist demagogues declare that there is a “War on Christmas” threatening our freedom of religious expression.
I suggest we step back and declare a Christmas truce. Let’s enjoy the season for what it is, a wonderfully confusing time of year. Let’s appreciate each other’s company as fellow human beings whose lives are inextricably tied together.
Something similar happened in France on Christmas, 1914, a few months after the start of WW I. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, in the remote Balkan town of Sarajevo supposedly started the war. But there is no agreement on how or why that led to the War that killed 10 million combatants.
A sardonic joke at the time was, “Have you seen the headline? Archduke found alive. War a mistake.”
The unofficial truce between British/French and German/Austrian combatants began on Christmas Eve. The Brits saw a few small trees, lit by candles, on top of the German’s trenches, and heard familiar carols being sung. Cautiously, one gesture of shared humanity led to another.
The opposing forces left water-logged trenches to greet one another. They exchanged cigarettes, souvenirs and rations, and in some instances joined together in singing carols. They exchanged wounded prisoners and held joint burial ceremonies for their dead. On Christmas Day, there was an impromptu soccer game.
Hearing about it later, the officers, of course, were furious. Their troops were supposed to kill each other, not fraternize as fellow human beings. As they wished, the intensity increased and ended with each regarding the other as less than human. Even poison gas was used.
Mark Twain is quoted as saying history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme. There are several similarities between the beginning of WW I and today. Then, like today, commerce, transportation and communication were becoming more efficient and globalized. Tribal enmities, with the support of their friends and allies, escalated until things got completely out of control.
Today, the rivalry between our gangs of political purists and their operatives and lobbyists, cheered on by deep-pocketed supporters, produced an uncivil political environment and paralyzed government.
A Calvin and Hobbes cartoon speaks to both times. Precocious six-year-old Calvin asks Hobbes, his stuffed tiger, how soldiers killing each other solve problems. Today he might ask how problems can be solved when legislators’ primary goals are to kill or maim each other’s proposals.
The Congressional budget bill, keeping the government open for business for a year, provides a glimmer of hope that, during our Christmas truce, individuals in the warring gangs might discover our shared humanity and destiny and start solving problems.
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