Christmas Every Day

Who’s that coming down the stairs? Why it’s Der Fuehrer! Come, fellow members of the Hitlerjugend, let’s wish our dictator a Merry Christmas.

Santa has been used to advertise every thing from weapons to condoms to alcohol to power tools to Turkish tobacco. I can’t say I would take smoking advice from anyone who looked like the dude in these 1915 and 1919 ads.

I always wanted a more exciting name than Gerry Bowler. For years, I wished I had been baptised something like “Lance Sterling”.  I would have settled for “Frank Manley”, the name attached to this turn-of-the-centry boy’s own hero.

Look at the short length of those hockey sticks; playing with them must have caused plenty of back ache.

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The Stalin regime wished to abolish Christmas and to shift festivities to a secular New Year celebration. Here is a seasonal greeting featuring partisans blowing up a German troop truck. It reads “Happy New Year”.

Here is another SS Christmas oddity: a picture of a clay candle-holder, a Jullichte. The original was found in an archaeological dig and was supposed to represent the pagan Teutonic past before the Christian conversion of Germany. Replicas were given out as gifts and features in Nazi bonfire lighting ceremonies.

Hitler’s SS was generally hostile to Christmas as a Christian festival. They preferred to honour the pagan Winter Solstice and to term the season “Julfest” rather that “Weihnacht”.