Christmas Every Day

St Nicholas Eve

I have hundreds of German and Austro-Hungarian Christmas cards from World War I but this is the sole example I have of one that employs St Nicholas. Though the saint was a popular gift-bringer in German-speaking Catholic territories, he seems to have had no place on such cards. It is the Christ Child (Christkindl) or a Santa Claus (der Weihnachtsmann) figure who appears as the bearer of supernatural bounty.

Accompanying St Nicholas is Krampus, a beloved figure in Austria and some neighbouring areas. Krampus is portrayed as a demon who will threaten kids with chains, switches, or a pack into which he will throw bad children. Between the two is the Christmas angel. In Hungarian and German is the wish “Merry Christmas”

General Lee and Santa Claus was a children’s book of 1867 written by Louise Clack. It is set in the post-Civil War American South where three little girls, Lutie, Birdie and Minnie (the latter still a hardened rebel because of the memory of her father who died in the Confederate army) wonder at the absence of Santa Claus during the war years. They write to General Robert E. Lee as “the goodest man who ever lived” to ask him “whether Santa Claus loves the little rebel children, for we think that he don’t; because he has not come to see us for four Christmas Eves.” General Lee favours them with the following reply: in fact Santa Claus does love the children of the South but in 1861 Lee himself stopped Santa from delivering any toys to the Confederacy. He said: “Santa Claus, take every one of the toys you have back as far as Baltimore, sell them, and with the money you get buy medicines, bandages, ointments and delicacies for our sick and wounded men; do it and do it quickly — it will be all right with the children.” And Santa did so for the duration of the war.

General Lee and Santa Claus is remarkable for its very early connection of American politics and Christmas and as a Southern counterpoint to the Civl War cartoons of Thomas Nast who had made Santa Claus into a firm supporter of the Union. Clack’s depiction of little rebel girls desolate at their desertion by Santa Claus shows how important a figure he had become in the imaginations of American children. The American Civil War did much to accelerate the reception of Christmas in the U.S.A. as a holiday representing homecoming and family

Italians were not enthusiasts of the Christmas card craze early in the 20th century but I do have two examples from their country as it participated in World War I.

The first is a rather harmless attempt to evoke seasonal jollity by pairing children and a piece of artillery.

The second is more heart-felt. It shows an Italian woman in chains, presumably a metaphor for those of Italian stock languishing under the rule of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and a charge by the famous feather-helmed Bersaglieri infantry. Above them an angel signals divine approval of the war effort and the caption reads “Christmas of glory”.

One day away from Advent, our look at Christmas in wartime takes us to Nazi Germany. If Hitler’s National Socialists (and especially the SS) had had their way Christmas would have been replaced by a pagan Julfest with festivities on the winter solstice instead of December 25. However, Christmas was too firmly rooted in German culture to be attacked so directly. Instead the Nazi state tried a campaign of bait and switch, offering material and ceremonies that looked like Christmas but which were really subversive of its Christian essence.

This is mostly clearly in evidence in an Advent calendar sent out to German families to use in the run-up to Christmas Day. There were no stories of the baby Jesus; rather, a forest-born Golden Child was featured. No angels on the tree but swastika-shaped ornaments; St Nicholas was replaced by Knecht Ruprecht who was linked in the text to Nordic mythology.

Note the whirling sun which evokes the solstice and the swastika.

The caption says “Soon Ruprecht will enter the house and empty his sack for me. I gave his white horse hay which he likes.”

The 1943 edition of the Advent calendar shows German soldiers mourning at the grave of a fallen comrade surrounding by vignettes of Nazi conquests: burning villages in Russia, sinking merchantmen in the Atlantic, grapes from France, etc. The next year, the last Christmas of the war, this advent calendar kept the image of the soldiers but removed the wreath of victories celebrating territories the Germans had been driven out of.

In today’s image a French soldier of World War I confronts the Hun with a piece of artillery. Its resemblance to the traditional Yule log-shaped Christmas dessert, gives us the caption “la buche de noël”.

The “75” on the cannon tells us this is the justly-famous “French 75”, a rapid-firing, highly-accurate weapon with a hydro-pneumatic recoil device.

So famous was the gun that a cocktail was named after it. To make a “French 75” mix 2 ounces of gin with a half-ounce of simple syrup and a half-ounce of lemon juice. Shake, pour over ice and add 5 ounces of champagne. Serve in a highball glass.

Today’s wartime Christmas cards come to you from the Dominion of Canada. When Canada entered the Great War in 1914 it did so automatically as part of the British Empire. When Britain declared war on Nazi Germany in 1939, Canada was able to come to a separate decision on whether to join the struggle. A week after the British declaration the Canadian Parliament voted to sign on.

The first two cards, both from early in the war, show that the Union flag was  still the one to wave in a patriotic fashion rather than the Canadian Ensign.

In both Canada and the USA Christmas cards were used to raise money for the war effort. Here is a French Canadian version.

The captions read “Gifts that will hasten victory” and “A Guarantee of Peace and Liberty. We must all contribute, so that is why I am sending you these War Savings stamps with my best wishes for the New Year. It is the best investment we can make to ensure a lasting peace.”

Today’s Christmas cards in wartime come to you from the Spanish Civil War, a nasty fratricidal struggle waged from 1936-1939, pitting the forces of right-wing rebels (backed by Nazi Germany and fascist Italy) against the left-wing republican government  (backed by the Soviet Union and an army of foreign volunteers called the International Brigades.)

Thousands of Marxist sympathizers from the United States (the Lincoln-Washington Battalion), Canada (the McKenzie-Papineau Battalion), Germany (the Ernst Thälmann Battalion), Italians (Garibaldi Battalion), etc., fought and died in battles against Francoist armies. Theirs is a tragic story, full of misunderstanding and hostility in their own countries and of betrayal by the Comintern, with moments of genuine heroism. 

Trapped inside the doomed “cauldron” at Stalingrad, Wehrmacht pastor Kurt Reuber drew a charcoal picture of the Madonna and Child on the back of a map and labelled it “Life, Light and Love, Christmas in the Cauldron Fortress Stalingrad 1942”. He took it from bunker to bunker to cheer the troops at Christmas 1942. Reuber described the effect on displaying it:

When according to ancient custom I opened the Christmas door, the slatted door of our bunker, and the comrades went in, they stood as if entranced, devout and too moved to speak in front of the picture on the clay wall. …The entire celebration took place under the influence of the picture, and they thoughtfully read the words: light, life, love. …Whether commander or simple soldier, the Madonna was always an object of outward and inward contemplation.

The work was sent out on the last transport plane to leave the siege but the artist was left with the rest of the Sixth Army to fall captive to the Soviets. Reuber died in a Russian prisoner of war camp in 1944. The picture was suppressed by Nazi officials during the war but is now on display in Berlin’s Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church.