The next time you’re
whining on about what a crap Christmas you had, because your mother in law over
did it on the sherry and told everyone what she really thinks about you, or
when your wife’s Uncle Stan spent Christmas afternoon asleep on the sofa
breaking wind with monotonous regularity, or your brother’s new girlfriend, who
kept hitting on your wife or your Gran who said “just a small dinner for me I
don’t have much of an appetite” then spent the afternoon eating all the
chocolate Brazils.
If this strikes a
chord think again and spare a thought for the half a million or so men of the
allied forces and six hundred thousand Germans who spent Christmas 1944 outside
in the snow of the coldest winter in a generation in the Ardennes forest during
the battle of the bulge.
Men like my father
sheltering in foxholes scratched out of the frozen earth with no hot food or
drink, unable to light fires for fear of giving their position away and
regularly coming under enemy fire or being shelled, then once you’ve hewn out a decent sized foxhole and settled down into it
out of the icy wind an order comes down the line for everyone to move out and
you move a hundred yards or less and dig another hole.
Go and tell your petty gripes to that generation and see if you get any
sympathy.
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