12. Christmas

Christmas.

"The chief festivities, so far as the officers were concerned, centered about Xmas Eve, leaving the day itself very much of an anti-climax, which is just what I have always thought must be the case where this custom prevails. We had our own dinner at 7 pm on Xmas Eve- here is the menu: Tomato - bisque soup – celery – olives – lobster à la Newburg - roast turkey, currant jelly, potato croquettes, peas – asparagus salad – plum pudding, fruit cake – nuts, raisins, fruit – coffee – champagne – port – cigars, cigarettes. How’s that for war rations, with everything the best, deliciously cooked, and lots of it?

The patients and enlisted men had their Xmas dinners during the middle part of the day, and I think that was the real reason why ours was put the day before, so as not to make too much work at once, which of course was entirely the proper thing to do. The wards looked really attractive. For two or three days beforehand all the patients had spent hours making chains of colored papers – it really looked ridiculous to go into a ward and see a group of big husky men – “up” patients – gathered about the stove, doing regular kindergarten work – cutting strips of colored paper, pasting them in links into long chains, making tree decorations out of cotton and tinsel, etc. In one ward I found them making a big “Merry Christmas’ sign to hang on the wall by taking a triangular piece of red cloth and pasting on it to form the letters strips of absorbed cotton, using marmalade to stick them on! And these be war times!! They assured me that it was a very old can, but I’m not so sure of that. Then I found that to paste the paper rings together they were using a very special glue that we have for fastening extension bandages on to fractured legs and which is very scarce – but what could you do, it was all they had!"