Dec 21, 2025
A TRUE Christmas Carol
12-25-25
Some wars are years, or generations, festering; some start on a random morning, or so it seems. But one thing we seldom encounter is peace breaking out. In the midst of a raging war, interrupting a bloody battle. Yet it has happened. Not many people know about the Christmas Truce. It was a virtual miracle during the first Christmas, in 1914, of World War I – the so-called Great War, surely the most useless of history’s many useless wars.
A few months after war was declared in Europe, by almost every big and small nation on the continent, almost a million soldiers already had been slaughtered. Christmastime had come, and soldiers were mired in trenches that were to become so established that for more than two years the battle line never moved more than 30 miles one direction or another. In that unlikely hellhole a miracle occurred.
Minor details differ but the dispositive facts are acknowledged: Peace broke out.
Soldiers of Germany, England (Scotland, actually), and France, at night, spontaneously sang Christmas carols… and were joined by their “enemies” who could hear across No Man’s Land. Nervous soldiers climbed from trenches to greet their foes, and shake hands; gifts were exchanged, even little trinkets, but also pastries and wine that had been sent from home. They shared pictures of wives and children… sang more hymns… and flares, intended to illuminate battlefields so to aim the cannons, were now shot skyward in celebration. There were tentative, but successful, attempts to communicate.
Of course they communicated. The languages that night were hymns and Bibles and chocolates and cigars. Handshakes and smiles and tears.
A Merry Christmas. A Holy Christmas. Peace on earth… at least in that narrow 27-mile-long battle line, south of Ypres and east of Armentieres, site of the song about les Mademoiselles, that night.
A British soldier recalled the Christmas Truce almost two decades later: We stuck up a board with a Merry Christmas on it. The enemy had stuck up a similar one. … Two of our men then threw their equipment off and jumped on the parapet with their hands above their heads. Two of the Germans did the same and commenced to walk up the river bank, our two men going to meet them. They met and shook hands and then we all got out of the trench.
We and the Germans met in the middle of No Man’s Land. Their officers were also now out. Our officers exchanged greetings with them.… One of their men, speaking in English, mentioned that he had worked in Brighton for some years and that he was fed up to the neck with this damned war and would be glad when it was all over. We told him that he wasn’t the only one that was fed up with it [Frank Richards, “Old Soldiers Never Die,” 1933].
Another history records: [The British Brigadier General G.T. Forrestier-Walker] issued a directive forbidding fraternization: “For it discourages initiative in commanders, and destroys offensive spirit in all ranks.… Friendly intercourse with the enemy, unofficial armistices and exchange of tobacco and other comforts, however tempting and occasionally amusing they may be, are absolutely prohibited” [Stanley Weintraub, “Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce,” 2001]. Officers commanded that their men stopped these spontaneous endorsements of peace. After all, they had wars to run.
How much different would the next day have been – how much different would the world be today – if the Truce had held?
Note that chocolates and cigars were only the presents. The GIFTS were hymns and Bible verses – they brought the soldiers out of trenches; not the prospect of snacks or smokes or a soccer game in the snow.
Christmas. God did not intend for Jesus’s Incarnation, the spirit of that Christmas Truce, to be a one-time miracle; but to be everyday life. He intended that we know-and-show that love and fellowship can be normal, not rare. We can be changed by the Holy Day, not be annoyed by yet another holiday.
“You started it!” “No, you did!!!” Wouldn’t it be great if we all exchanged those words happily, about starting love, sharing affection, and living in Heavenly Peace?
Who “started it”? God did.
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