Chapter 27. Christmas 1944

“… I’ve never had such a satisfactory feeling about the coming of Xmas” I wrote on a V-mail dated December 21. … ”This is what we are doing.  In the first place the whole hospital is decorating like mad.  We started the first thing by handing out silver tin foil you know and then we painted wrapping paper with bright colors.  Some of the patients started making plaques out of colored paper for their wards.  Then we arranged through the Town Major to get a Xmas tree for every ward, so started a contest to give prizes to the best decorated wards.  Thus this whole hospital is bristling with the most decorative stuff you can imagine.

“The chapel choirs are going to go around on Xmas eve and sing Xmas carols in the wards about 11 o’clock, which will be wonderful I know.  But most of all we are all wrapping.  We just got our allotted portion of Red Cross Xmas boxes which are very nice.  They include three small books, two packs of cigarettes, an address book, a celluloid picture wallet, an oil silk tobacco pouch, which all the fellows at the front use instead of a wallet so that their stuff stays dry, a pack of PK gum which we haven’t seen since we left the states, and two packages of candy.

“These boxes are in pretty poor shape from travel so we’re wrapping them in red or green, or other colored tissue paper.  We plan to put every patient’s name on a name tag (which thanks to our friends are coming through the mail) and put them under the trees after midnight Xmas Eve.

“The boxes I asked for from all of you are beginning to come, and thank God for it because we have more patients in the hospital—many more than we received Red Cross Xmas boxes.  It’s a God-send to get stuff to give the extra fellows.  The whole outfit is helping us or we’d never finish!”

In another V-mail I had written that I mentioned that some of the patients couldn’t wait ‘til tomorrow for their Xmas tree and for greens.  One climbed a pine tree (in his Army bathrobe) and got several branches which he smuggled with ropes into his second story ward.

“Every night we have a wrapping and decorations bee.  Everybody works together and on our pot-bellied stoves we make fudge or pop some of that popcorn from the stuff you sent.  Tomorrow we’re taking a colored chorus thru the wards to sing Xmas carols.”

Here below is a copy of a story printed in the Cathedral Volunteer Voice at Washington National Cathedral summarizing Christmas in l944, war-time France:

The night before Christmas was what I remember most.  It was wickedly cold in Alsace with several inches of iced up snow that December.  Town Croix Rouge agreed to sew hundreds of drawstring bags, “ditty bags”, for us and then offered to set up a Christmas tree in each of our ten 100-patient wards.  There was nothing to trim with.  Nevertheless we announced that there would be a prize for the ward that had the best decorated tree.

Our stock of items that came in from Washington and London Red Cross warehouses such as combs, toothbrushes, mirrors, razors, soap was running low.

Fearing this might happen, many months earlier the five of us Red Cross workers had asked our folks back home to mail personal items for the GIs to us.  And how they had responded!

On Christmas Eve the last ambulatory patient finally left the carol sing we had held in our Red Cross Shanty recreation shack.  We workers set about filling the hundreds of ditty bags with our prized personal care stuff.  We borrowed a ward litter and one of the orthopedic doctors heard what we were doing and offered to help us.

We piled the litter 100 bags high and with the doctor’s help lugged it to a ward, close to half a block away.  Ten times, piled high and lugged through the crisp, frigid snow.  All night long, not a wink of sleep.  But we had managed by Christmas morn to eke out a present for every patient.

That morning the daylight allowed us to see and judge the 10 ward trees—most beautiful, imaginative, unbelievable in creativity and design.  What they had done with such commonplace items as tinfoil, wrappers from chewing gum and cigarettes, tongue depressors, raveling from old bed linens, and such.  Fantastic!

What a Christmas to remember.