It was Thanksgiving.
The Coolidge's went to church
The first Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade was held. It was billed the Macy's Christmas Parade.
Football games occured, reflecting a custom dating back to pre Reformation England.
Last edition:
Raids on Berlin by the Royal Air Force and the U.S. Army Air Force were temporarily halted. The Luftwaffe likewise conducted no raids on the United Kingdom.
Sixty-four prisoners tunneled out of the Ninth Fort in Lithuania. The facility housed mostly Lithuanian Jews. About half would be recaptured by mid-January.
U.S. Task Force 50.2 raided Kavieng, New Guinea, with aircraft, sinking a Japanese transport ship.
The Scharnhorst departed northern Norway to attack Convoy JW-55B.
The epic The Song of Bernadette was released.
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The film tells the story of St. Bernadette Soubirous, the French peasant woman who saw the Virgin Mary at Lourdes.
Attending movies at Christmas, and even on Christmas Day, is a tradition with a lot of people, although I've never done it.
The Red Army commenced the Dnieper–Carpathian Offensive.
The operation was very large scale, as everything in the East was by this time, involving around 2,400,000 Soviet personnel against around 900,000 Germans, 300,000 Hungarians and 150,000 Romanians.
In a Christmas Eve radio address, President Roosevelt delivered the news that Gen. Dwight Eisenhower would be in command of the Allied invasion of continental Europe, discounting of course that the Allies had already landed on continental Europe in Italy. The overall "chat" stated:
War entails just that. There is no easy road to victory. And the end is not yet in sight.
God bless all of you who fight our battles on this Christmas Eve.
The Battle of Hellzapoppin Ridge and Hill 600A, which had commenced on Bougainville on December 12, ended in a U.S. victory.
In the Solomon's, a U.S. Task force bombarded the Buka Island and the Japanese base at Buin on Bougainville.
The HMS Hurricane was damaged beyond repair by a torpedo fired by the U-415. The U-645 was sunk by the USS Schenck.
The first National Christmas Tree event was held in Washington, D.C., featuring a 100-member choir from the city's First Congregational Church at the South Portico of the White House and President Calvin Coolidge pushing a button to illuminate 2,500 electric bulbs adorning the tree.
On the same day, Mrs. Coolidge visited a Salvation Army location.
Carolers visited the White House.
Mexican revolutionaries were suffering a set back.
The Dixmude, a war prize German Zeppelin in French service, exploded in midair, with all hands lost.
Business!” cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”
A Christmas Carol
You know what I mean. Pretty much any Christmas movie made since It's A Wonderful Life, save for A Christmas Story.
They are freakin awful. The worst are anything that starts with "National Lampoon's". National Lampoon is a byword for "pretentious, juvenile, and stupid".
Make them stop.
So, as a result, it's the day which the Orthodox who follow the Julian calendar, which is not all of them, celebrate Christmas.
In Ukraine, where the majority of Christians are in the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which obtained autocephalous status on December 15, 2018, Metropolitan Epiphany, its head will lead a service in the Assumption Cathedral of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra monastery for the first time since 1685. In that following year, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church fell under Moscow's authority. The Metropolitanate of Kyiv actually became an ordinary diocese of the Moscow Patriarchate in 1722
This year, however, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church gave its members the option of celebrating Christmas on December 25, which became a widely discussed topic in Ukraine itself, where celebration of a civil Christmas on December 25 had already become widespread. The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, an Easter Rite Catholic Church which is the largest Eastern Rite church in the world, apparently already did.
The Ukrainian Orthodox Church's having obtained autocephalous status has been an odd backdrop to the war. The Russian Orthodox Church is the largest Eastern Orthodox Church in the world, and it has been one of the primary opponents to reunion with Rome. The relationship between the various Orthodox Churches is complicated on a legal basis, but generally the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople is regarded as being the primus inter pares between the various autocephalous church's heads, although sometimes the Pope is also referred to in that fashion. He is regarded, generally, as having the power to accord autocephalous status, which at least from the outside is problematic as it would seem to suggest that he has a sort of superior authority which the Eastern Orthodox otherwise reject as to the Pope, even though they recognized early in their history. Anyhow, the granting of autocephalous status by the Ecumenical Patriarch was fiercely resisted by Moscow, and it has lead to a round of schisms. Moscow continues to deny that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church is autocephalous, and one of the claims of Russians in the war is that they are defending Orthodoxy.
As for the United States, about 1,200,000 Americans are reported as being in an Eastern Orthodox Church. At least in Wyoming, most of the Eastern Orthodox Churches are Greek Orthodox, although they often have Russian Orthodox members and may be served by Priests who are from another branch of Orthodoxy. Gillette has an Antiochean Orthodox Church, which represents a congregation which converted from Protestant fundamentalism following an intense study of the early church.
If this is a time to rest and recover, then be sure and do so without guilt. God made rest a part of His commands to us. Enjoy the joy and remember that He made us human beings, not human doings.
Fr. Joseph Krupp.
Fr. Krupp's Facebook post here was synchronicitous for me.
I didn't take much time off last year. And my not taking "much", what I mean is that I took three days really off, just off, because I had surgery and was laying in the hospital.
That's not really good.
I'd like to claim that it was for one reason or another, but truth be known, i'ts something I imposed upon myself. And I do this every year.
Indeed, I'm much worse about it than I used to be.
All the things you hear about not taking time off are 100% true, if not 200%. You become less efficient, for one thing. And if you work extra hours, sooner or later, you'll acclimate yourself to working the extra hours to the point where you need to. That's become your work life.
Christmas in my work place essentially always works the same way. We work, normally, the day before Christmas, December 24, until noon. At noon, we dismiss the staff and all go to a collective lawyer's lunch. That institution is, I think, a remnant of an earlier era in our society in general, when it could be expected that most professional institutions would remain a certain size and everyone who worked there would have a sort of collegiality. It sort of recalls, in a way, the conditions described by Scrooge's original employer in A Christmas Carrol, in the shop run by Mr. Fezziwig.
This use to really prevail in firms when I was first practicing. I recall being at lunch on December 24 at a local club restaurant in which other firms would also be there. Everyone was doing the same thing. I haven't seen another firm at one now, however, for years. Maybe they just go somewhere else, but I sort of suspect that they're not doing it.
Well, good for us. It's hard not to have a certain feeling of sadness about it, however, as three of the lawyers who once were part of that are now dead. Others have moved on long ago. New faces have come, of course.
Anyhow, that institution sort of ties up the afternoon of December 24, but it's an afternoon off. If you are a Catholic with a family, it's always been a bit tight, as we normally go to Mass on Christmas Eve and then gather after that. Christmas is obviously a day off, as is Boxing Day, December 26, although most Americans don't refer to Boxing Day by that name.
This year Christmas came on a Sunday, which was nice as it made December 23 the day of the lunch and effectively an extra day off. We took, of course, Boxing Day off.
Sometime in there, I began to wonder why I hadn't taken the whole week off. With just three days off, beyond Sundays, and having worked most of the 52 Saturdays of the year, I should have. I had the things done, pretty much, that I needed to get done.
What was I thinking?
If this is a time to rest and recover, then be sure and do so without guilt. God made rest a part of His commands to us. Enjoy the joy and remember that He made us human beings, not human doings.
Well, I'm actually at the point, in spite of myself, that I'm so acclimated to going to the work that I feel guilty if I take time off. And frankly, the Internet hasn't helped much. On the afternoon of the 23d, I received a text message asking me if I was working that afternoon. I wasn't, and they were gracious about it, but this is how things tend to be. It's hard to actually escape the office.
On Boxing Day I went goose and duck hunting. Conditiond were great.
I was going to go with my son, but events conspired against it, so it was just me and the dog.
Earlier this year, my wife had us buy a bigger smoker. We had not had one until fairly recently, when we won one at a Duck's Unlimited banquet. That one is a little traveling one, sort of a tailgating smoker, and can work from a car's battery system. You can plug it in, and we've enjoyed it, but due to its size, we decided to get a bigger one and did. It's been great.
This was my first occasion actually using it, something necessitated by the fact that our oven is more or less out due to some sort of weird oven thing that happened to it which will not get addressed until sometime this week. Besides, I'd been wanting to try smoked waterfowl.
Merry Christmas!
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Here's hoping that it was a good one. It will not be, of course, for everyone. Remember them.
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Pope Francis addressed this in his Christmas homily:
What does this night still have to say to our lives? Two thousand years after the birth of Jesus, after so many Christmases spent amid decorations and gifts, after so much consumerism that has packaged the mystery we celebrate, there is a danger. We know many things about Christmas, but we forget its real meaning. So how do we rediscover the meaning of Christmas? First of all, where do we go to find it? The Gospel of Jesus’ birth appears to have been written precisely for this purpose: to take us by the hand and lead us where God would have us go.
It starts with a situation not unlike our own: everyone is bustling about, getting ready for an important event, the great census, which called for much preparation. In that sense, the atmosphere was very much like our modern celebration of Christmas. Yet the Gospel has little to do with that worldly scenario; it quickly shifts our gaze to something else, which it considers more important. It is a small and apparently insignificant detail that it nonetheless mentions three times, always in relation to the central figures in the narrative. First, Mary places Jesus “in a manger” (Lk 2:7); then the angels tell the shepherds about “a child wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger” (v. 12); and finally, the shepherds, who find “the child lying in the manger” (v. 16). In order to rediscover the meaning of Christmas, we need to look to the manger. Yet why is the manger so important? Because it is the sign, and not by chance, of Christ’s coming into this world. It is how he announces his coming. It is the way God is born in history, so that history itself can be reborn. What then does the Lord tell us? Through the manger, three things, at least: closeness, poverty and concreteness.
Closeness. The manger serves as a feeding trough, to enable food to be consumed more quickly. In this way, it can symbolize one aspect of our humanity: our greed for consumption. While animals feed in their stalls, men and women in our world, in their hunger for wealth and power, consume even their neighbors, their brothers and sisters. How many wars have we seen! And in how many places, even today, are human dignity and freedom treated with contempt! As always, the principal victims of this human greed are the weak and the vulnerable. This Christmas too, as in the case of Jesus, a world ravenous for money, ravenous for power and ravenous for pleasure does not make room for the little ones, for so many unborn, poor and forgotten children. I think above all of the children devoured by war, poverty and injustice. Yet those are the very places to which Jesus comes, a child in the manger of rejection and refusal. In him, the Child of Bethlehem, every child is present. And we ourselves are invited to view life, politics and history through the eyes of children.
In the manger of rejection and discomfort, God makes himself present. He comes there because there we see the problem of our humanity: the indifference produced by the greedy rush to possess and consume. There, in that manger, Christ is born, and there we discover his closeness to us. He comes there, to a feeding trough, in order to become our food. God is no father who devours his children, but the Father who, in Jesus, makes us his children and feeds us with his tender love. He comes to touch our hearts and to tell us that love alone is the power that changes the course of history. He does not remain distant and mighty, but draws near to us in humility; leaving his throne in heaven, he lets himself be laid in a manger.
Dear brother, dear sister, tonight God is drawing near to you, because you are important to him. From the manger, as food for your life, he tells you: “If you feel consumed by events, if you are devoured by a sense of guilt and inadequacy, if you hunger for justice, I, your God, am with you. I know what you are experiencing, for I experienced it myself in that manger. I know your weaknesses, your failings and your history. I was born in order to tell you that I am, and always will be, close to you”. The Christmas manger, the first message of the divine Child, tells us that God is with us, he loves us and he seeks us. So take heart! Do not allow yourself to be overcome by fear, resignation or discouragement. God was born in a manger so that you could be reborn in the very place where you thought you had hit rock bottom. There is no evil, there is no sin, from which Jesus does not want to save you. And he can. Christmas means that God is close to us: let confidence be reborn!
The manger of Bethlehem speaks to us not only of closeness, but also of poverty. Around the manger there is very little: hay and straw, a few animals, little else. People were warm in the inn, but not here in the coldness of a stable. Yet that is where Jesus was born. The manger reminds us that he was surrounded by nothing but love: Mary, Joseph and the shepherds; all poor people, united by affection and amazement, not by wealth and great expectations. The poverty of the manger thus shows us where the true riches in life are to be found: not in money and power, but in relationships and persons.
And the first person, the greatest wealth, is Jesus himself. Yet do we want to stand at his side? Do we draw close to him? Do we love his poverty? Or do we prefer to remain comfortably ensconced in our own interests and concerns? Above all, do we visit him where he is to be found, namely in the poor mangers of our world? For that is where he is present. We are called to be a Church that worships a Jesus who is poor and that serves him in the poor. As a saintly bishop once said: “The Church supports and blesses efforts to change the structures of injustice, and sets down but one condition: that social, economic and political change truly benefit the poor” (O.A. ROMERO, Pastoral Message for the New Year, 1 January 1980). Certainly, it is not easy to leave the comfortable warmth of worldliness to embrace the stark beauty of the grotto of Bethlehem, but let us remember that it is not truly Christmas without the poor. Without the poor, we can celebrate Christmas, but not the birth of Jesus. Dear brothers, dear sisters, at Christmas God is poor: let charity be reborn!
We now come to our last point: the manger speaks to us of concreteness. Indeed, a child lying in a manger presents us with a scene that is striking, even crude. It reminds us that God truly became flesh. As a result, all our theories, our fine thoughts and our pious sentiments are no longer enough. Jesus was born poor, lived poor and died poor; he did not so much talk about poverty as live it, to the very end, for our sake. From the manger to the cross, his love for us was always palpable, concrete. From birth to death, the carpenter’s son embraced the roughness of the wood, the harshness of our existence. He did not love us only in words; he loved us with utter seriousness!
Consequently, Jesus is not satisfied with appearances. He who took on our flesh wants more than simply good intentions. He who was born in the manger, demands a concrete faith, made up of adoration and charity, not empty words and superficiality. He who lay naked in the manger and hung naked on the cross, asks us for truth, he asks us to go to the bare reality of things, and to lay at the foot of the manger all our excuses, our justifications and our hypocrisies. Tenderly wrapped in swaddling clothes by Mary, he wants us to be clothed in love. God does not want appearances but concreteness. May we not let this Christmas pass without doing something good, brothers and sisters. Since it is his celebration, his birthday, let us give him the gifts he finds pleasing! At Christmas, God is concrete: in his name let us help a little hope to be born anew in those who feel hopeless!
Jesus we behold you lying in the manger. We see you as close, ever at our side: thank you Lord! We see you as poor, in order to teach us that true wealth does not reside in things but in persons, and above all in the poor: forgive us, if we have failed to acknowledge and serve you in them. We see you as concrete, because your love for us is palpable. Help us to give flesh and life to our faith. Amen.
For all of us, we hope your Christmas wasn't excessively Arctic, although this is of course Nothern Hemisphere winter.
Old Radio: December 25, 1942: 'Victory Parade's Christmas Par...: December 25, 1942: All day long, Coca-Cola sponsored Victory Parade's Christmas Party of Spotlight Band s, transmitted on NBC Blue N...
A monograph sponsored by the National Park Service states the following about the Victory Parade radio program:
An Overview of The Spotlight Bands Series
In the fall of 1941, the Coca Cola Company signed a twenty-six week con¬tract with the Mutual Broadcasting System (MBS) to air over 125 of its stations, the best of the big bands six nights a week. Monday through Friday, for a quarter of an hour from 10:15 to 10:30 pm Eastern Standard Time, five different bands appeared from the stage of the new Mutual Theater in New York City. The building which held a capacity of 1,000 guests had been the former Maxine Elliott Theater on West 39th Street that the network had acquired and renovated with the most modern of broadcasting equipment for the new series. Sixty percent of the programs originated from these facilities with the remaining forty percent being split between Chicago and Hollywood.
The Kay Kyser Orchestra was the first band to broadcast from the theater on November 3rd and for the next four evenings the melodies of Guy Lombardo, Sammy Kaye, Tommy Dorsey and Eddy Duchin were heard across the nation. The Saturday segment known as the 'Silver Platter' portion aired at the same time but was thirty min¬utes in length, 10:15-10:45 PM. However, unlike the Monday through Friday bands, the one on Saturday was not selected by the network. Rather, this time spot was kept open for the leader rolling up the largest nation-wide record sales during the previous week, thereby creating a mystery band for the listening audience each Saturday evening. The first 'Silver Platter' winner was the Freddy Martin Orchestra which had been selected because they had amassed the greatest amount of single sales the previous month with their recording of Tchaikovsky's classic, Piano Concerto in B Flat, featuring pianist Jack Fina.
Within a relatively short time, the Spotlight Band broadcasts became the most popular big band draw on the radio dial. The result was that the network rescheduled the series into an earlier primetime slot for greater audience exposure. With the February 2, 1942, program featuring the Benny Goodman band, a change was made to 9:30-9:45 PM Eastern War Time weekdays and 9:30-10:00 PM for Saturdays.
As the series neared its twenty-six week completion, negotiations between the network and the sponsor to renew stalled. The last performance aired on May 2, 1942 and featured the Harry James Orchestra from Hollywood. (As a footnote, the James band won the most 'Silver Platters' in the first series totaling seven including the last six Saturdays in a row because of their hit recording, Don't Want To Walk Without You, featuring vocalist Helen Forrest).
Throughout the summer, negotiations with the network and Coca Cola con¬tinued but to no avail. For various reasons, the soft drink firm decided not to re-sign with Mutual. The “music trades” reported that the sponsor wished to become more involved in the war cause and were determined to return the program to the airwaves in the fall with a “new look”. By mid-August, Coca Cola had agreed to terms for a sec¬ond series with the Blue Network, soon to become the American Broadcasting Company or (ABC).
The first move toward the “new look” for the series was a name change to “The Victory Parade of Spotlight Bands”. With America now in the War, Coca Cola insist¬ed that their presentation be geared as much to the entertainment of the fighting men on both the home and training fronts as to its civilian audience. The format of six different bands each week was retained, but the nightly broadcast time was extended to twenty five minutes, 9:30-9:55 PM EWT. The last five minutes of each half hour was devoted to local news. Another important new feature was that the listening audience became directly involved with the selection of the weekly bands. A combination of two polls rather than record sales now determined which band played and where. The first involved the civilian listeners who voted for the bands they wanted to hear each week and the second was the “Victory Poll” open only to service personnel and defense work¬ers who, with their votes, determined the different nightly locations. The most signifi¬cant difference from the original series was that the broadcasts now aired directly from the various military installations, hospitals, and war plants throughout the country. Not only did Coca Cola send the bands to these locations at their expense, but, each time, the bands were booked and paid to play a three hour engagement. Also, for the first time, the radio shows in this series were numbered by the network. The importance of this notation will become apparent shortly. (Ironically, the first band to start the second series on September 21, 1942, was the Harry James Orchestra performing from the Marine Base on Parris Island, North Carolina).
On December 25th, Coca Cola sponsored a special presentation entitled, “Uncle Sam's Christmas Tree of Spotlight Bands”. This big band bonanza went on the air at noon EWT with the Sammy Kaye Orchestra from Fort Monmouth at Red Bank, New Jersey, and with few interruptions moved west and closed at midnight featuring the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra at the San Pedro Naval Base, San Pedro, California. A total of forty-three different bands, including Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong, Gene Krupa, Duke Ellington and Fletcher Henderson, participated in fifteen minute segments from all over the country. The music marathon was the largest of its kind ever attempted on a coast to coast radio network.
As the twenty-six week contract with the Blue Network ended in March, 1943, the Coca Cola Company appeared pleased and signed on again for the next two years. At this time Armed Forces Radio Service (AFRS) became involved with their own version of the band series. AFRS began, on March 22, to record the network programs direct from radio and telephone line feeds onto acetate lacquers in their studio facili¬ties. Later the programs were remixed and edited down to a fifteen minute format elim¬inating any mention of the sponsor. A new musical introduction and announcements by an AFRS broadcaster were then added. These new versions were pressed onto 16-inch transcription discs and distributed via AFRS to radio stations within their network around the world. (As a further footnote, many of these discs have survived till today and have proved a valuable asset in logging the specific whereabouts of the hundreds of bands at the time as well as the contents of their performances).
The first band that AFRS recorded for their purposes was the Hal McIntyre Orchestra. This program was #157 in the network series and assigned #1 with AFRS. This meant that originally there was a numerical difference of 156 between the two list¬ings. However, in October a discrepancy occurred when there appeared to be no pro¬gram #177 in the AFRS series. Many theories have surfaced in an attempt to explain this error. However, to date, no explanation has held water. Therefore, from this point onward a numerical difference of 155 existed between the series. For the next two years the Victory Parade of Spotlight Bands program numbering continued through #858 on the network and #703 on AFRS until Saturday June 16, 1945 with the Eddie Oliver Orchestra. At this time Coca Cola ended its six nights a week broadcasts and long term relationship with ABC.
However, two nights later, on June 18th, the Spotlight Band programs were back on the air when Coca Cola again teamed with Mutual (MBS), their original network partner, from the fall of 1941. With this move came a cutback in airtime for the bands. Instead of six nights a week, they now only performed three nights: Monday, Wednesday and Friday at the same time. The first band to broadcast in the new week¬ly format and initiate the third Spotlight Band series was the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra followed on Wednesday by Vincent Lopez. The Friday spot was pre-empted. For the next nine months until the end of March 1946, the band series continued unchanged from various venues and military installations around the country. On March 29th, with the networks 979th program (AFRS #826), the Ray Herbeck Orchestra brought to a close the third Spotlight series.
The band show now embarked on its fourth and final association with Coca Cola. This involved three set bands, one for each of the same three nights of the week. On Monday April 1st, there was Guy Lombardo; Wednesday, April 3rd, Xavier Cugat; and Friday, April 5th, the Harry James Orchestra. Although the network at this time discon¬tinued numbering the programs, AFRS continued with theirs. Much success and radio exposure for the dozens of different big bands had transpired since the original series began in the fall of 1941, but the marketing value of these musical organizations was no longer what it had been. Coca Cola decided it no longer wanted to be in the band business and let its contract with Mutual expire on December 27, 1946. With the Harry James appearance of November 22, the great era of the Victory Parade of Spotlight Bands came to a close.
Wayne Knight, Music Historian
The British 8th Army captured Sirte.
Fernand Bonnier de La Chapelle, the French resistance royalist who had assassinated Admiral Darlan, was executed. He was rehabilitated in 1945 on the basis that Darlan's assassination had been "in the interest of liberation of France" although you apparently have to be French to grasp how.
German soldiers at Stalingrad receive their last issuance of horsemeat. The Germans had by this point slaughtered all of their horses.
Christmas dinners were held for those far away from home, including this one at the Andrew Feruseth Club on Christmas Day.
American families, like that of my father, went through their second wartime Christmas, but in some ways this one was significantly different. Various types of rationing had set in, and the war was now over a year old with no end in sight, at least no end that most people could reasonably foresee.
Canadian ones, like my mothers, were going through their fourth wartime Christmas.
