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.
