Christmas Every Day

A traditional English Christmas game whose rules are now lost to us. A passage from The Spectator of 1712 refers to it:

Mr Spectator

I desire to know in your Next, if the merry Game of the Parson has lost his Cloke, is not mightily in Vogue amongst the fine Ladies this Christmas; because I see they wear Hoods of all Colours, which I suppose is for that Purpose; if it is, and you think it proper, I will carry some of those Hoods with me to our Ladies in Yorkshire; because they injoined me to bring them something from London that was very new. If you can tell any Thing in which I can obey their Commands more agreeably, be pleas’d to inform me, and you will extreamly oblige,

Your humble Servant

Literally “The House Christ”, a sixteenth-century German term for the gift-bringer. German Protestants who wished to abolish the Catholic cult of saints needed a replacement for St. Nicholas as the traditional bearer of presents at Christmas. Clergymen then spoke of Christ himself as the bringer of good things at Christmas and his collection of gifts as the “Christ-bundle”. From this developed the belief in the “Christkindl”, a child-like figure dressed in white representing the Christ Child as bringer of Christmas gifts.

How often Santa brings a bag of heavy weaponry for good girls and boys.

Let’s take a look at some interesting Christmas-time advertisements. Here’s a 1905 ad for a pistol. A bargain at $3.00.

A Russian Christmas card from the Eastern Front in 1915.

Finland, because of its longstanding quarrel with the Soviet Union, allied itself with Nazi Germany. For such a small country it put up a creditable resistance to the Red Army in the “Winter War”. “Christmas Greetings” reads this message depicting a cavalry soldier in a snowy landscape.

Croatian nationalism took an ugly turn during World War II when it allied itself with Nazi Germany. The Ustase movement was a fascist hyper-Catholic hate group that fought against other ethnic minorities and the Yugoslav partisan movement.

In 1915 Père Noël visited French poilus in the trenches bringing, naturally, wine.

A card from the “Fighting First”, aka the “Big Red One”, the American First Army of World War II.

It was hard to be jolly in the trenches of the Western Front in 1916 but this artist from the 3rd Canadian Pioneers, an engineering unit, tried.