CHRISTMAS LESSON 2020 FROM WWI FOR BALANCE

2020 Christmas lesson from WWI? Anyone? Anyone? Hands up?

The top shot is more than a bunch of guys and a soccer ball. They are the cannon fodder, the poison gas breathers, the machine gun targets for strafing practice, who took a war- break on Christmas.

Their Christmas lesson? Peace on earth. My view: I’m glad they didn’t play American football.

It’s one thing to kick a ball, and an entirely different thing to get your junk twisted in a pile-up. That’s never peaceful.

The guys climbed out of their trenches, soccer men in No Man’s Land. True or not, I hope the Smithsonian has the correct take:

The first reports of such a contest surfaced a few days afterward; on January 1, 1915, The Times published a letter written from a doctor attached to the Rifle Brigade, who reported “a football match… played between them and us in front of the trench.” The brigade’s official history insisted that no match took place because “it would have been most unwise to allow the Germans to know how weakly the British trenches were held.” But there is plenty of evidence that soccer was played that Christmas Day—mostly by men of the same nationality, but in at least three or four places between troops from the opposing armies.

2020 Christmas Lesson, Just One

Whether it’s kick-ball, football, or a grundle grabbing sumo match, know the rules.

If you don’t know the rules, learn the rules. More important, know the rules as they apply to you before you act.

Or just fly at it, but don’t complain if you get disqualified for rules violations.

The 2020 Christmas Lesson is about rules?

Think of an umbrella, not a big one, just big enough. The Made in America umbrella stands for truth, justice, equality, fraternity, and you are under its protection.

And it’s raining, raining hard on Christmas.

Your umbrella doesn’t protect against sideways rain, or the dark water splash when a bus hits a full pothole. It shields you from slime dripping down from slimy times.

2020 Christmas is a slippery one, slippery enough to call for one lesson, a balance lesson.

Keep your feet under you

Feel the blessings of a sound foundation this Christmas Day.

German soldiers and English soldiers found their balance one Christmas Day of WWI.

They didn’t play their game after a warm pre-match meal, a good stretch. They didn’t run out on the pitch from a luxury locker room.

And they didn’t get hot showers afterward.

Instead, they reverted to who they were before the grinding attrition of trench life in the mud, the blood, and the death.

And it mattered. Not enough to stop the war, but still.

Feeling Christmas Balance

Christmas feelings change from childhood, to adulthood, to parenthood, to lion maned aging-hunkhood.

Find one Christmas moment that shines brightest. It’s not the one with the most expensive gift, or the most disappointing gift. Instead, it’s a group memory of sharing the Christmas spirit.

It’s family, friends, strangers on a bus rolling through Ohio to Oregon. Keep looking until you find it.

Bring that jewel of a memory into focus and imagine it’s a lens, a clear crystal. Go ahead and hold it up to your eyes and see this Christmas Day through it.

One lens, one day. Today. And it doesn’t have to be all day.

Just keep it in mind when sideways rain drenches your pants under your long raincoat, when the bus hits the pothole and black water fills your shoes.

Keep it in mind when you find a decades old picture of you wearing red long-johns holding your baby in red long-johns, and he recreates the shot with his baby thirty-two years later.

Holds that lens up. You can do it. Feeling better?

Me, too.