@Granma
If I were a granma ... oh yeah, what a treat that would be. Kids make you cry, but grand kids make you smile ...
Can't wait ...

[comment:body]

@janis b

Your story and sentiments, like Marilyn said, are a gift. They are so evocative of the atmosphere and spirit of Christmas. It’s celebration is such a beautiful and special time in Germany. Enjoy a little bit for me all the glittering lights and candles glowing in the warmth.

I have to give some thought about a crib gift for baby Johnny. But you sure did make me smile.

All the best to you mimi, and everyone.

[video:https://youtu.be/fj6r3-sQr58]
(thank you friend)

@studentofearth
really ... it doesn't help ...life is always tough and all that thinking and studying just gives you headaches. Need to drink a little, but not without a big, fat meal first.

What should I cook for tonight? Carp, goose, duck or lamb with red apple cabbage, with brussel sprouts or green beens or simple pees and carrots? What kind of gravy? Orange sauce for the duck?

See I studied all the recipes and it didn't help in any way to make up my mind about the ... meal world.

Have a jolly time, studentofEearth
It's 'Kartoffel Gratin' ... and I have to peel the potatoes now.

Your writing often evoke memories of my Grandmother and Great Aunt, first generation Americans who spoke German at home and in the community until grade school. WWI had started and all students had to speak English.

Life was tough, but move on, make your own future and enjoy family times together. At times could be critical, but as I grew to know them better as an adult found they were more self critical then outwards to others. Helped create magical holiday memories for a child.

@lotlizard @lotlizard
... believe it?

I have a cousin, whose first son (now in his late forties) married a woman, who somehow still remembers how she grew up in the DDR. And they have two kids now and my cousins wife told me, that her daughter-in-law is homesick for the good 'ol times in formerly so-called Socialists' DDR?

Now tell me, what's there NOT to be confused about?

I rather go fishing dancing.

My favorite (/ducking) Christmas Carol from the US, err .... Utterly Superior diaspora.

[video:https://youtu.be/ok5WsPYcj5Y]

The elder of my two quasi-goddaughters is also nicknamed Mimi (short for Jasmine) and just turned 18 yesterday.

Regardless of what I may think of capitalist consumption season, now that I’m here in Saxony I play along for the sake of the kids and younger adults who knew the privations of the GDR and/or Hartz IV (as Germany’s government program is called that combines welfare and unemployment).

@Lookout
thank you so much for posting this. I remember having heard this story, but never has someone written and told so beautifully about it as you just did. Big hugs and Merry Christmas and just let's going on with cancelling out wars. Peace - it's such a nice thing to have.

Christmas and war...sometimes the two cancel each other and there is peace. Here's a story about WWI...

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9coPzDx6tA]

My name is Francis Tolliver. I come from Liverpool.
Two years ago the war was waiting for me after school.
To Belgium and to Flanders, to Germany to here,
I fought for King and country I love dear.
It was Christmas in the trenches where the frost so bitter hung.
The frozen field of France were still, no Christmas song was sung.
Our families back in England were toasting us that day,
their brave and glorious lads so far away.
I was lyin' with my mess-mates on the cold and rocky ground
when across the lines of battle came a most peculiar sound.
Says I "Now listen up me boys", each soldier strained to hear
as one young German voice sang out so clear.
"He's singin' bloddy well you know", my partner says to me.
Soon one by one each German voice joined in in harmony.
The cannons rested silent. The gas cloud rolled no more
as Christmas brought us respite from the war.
As soon as they were finished a reverent pause was spent.
'God rest ye merry, gentlemen' struck up some lads from Kent.
The next they sang was 'Stille Nacht". "Tis 'Silent Night'" says I
and in two toungues one song filled up that sky.
"There's someone commin' towards us" the front-line sentry cried.
All sights were fixed on one lone figure trudging from their side.
His truce flag, like a Christmas star, shone on that plain so bright
as he bravely strode, unarmed, into the night.
Then one by one on either side walked into no-mans-land
with neither gun nor bayonet we met there hand to hand.
We shared some secret brandy and wished each other well
and in a flare-lit soccer game we gave 'em hell.
We traded chocolates, cigarettes and photgraphs from home
these sons and fathers far away from families of their own.
Young Sanders played his squeeze box and they had a violin
this curious and unlikely band of men.
Soon daylight stole upon us and France was France once more.
With sad farewells we each began to settle back to war.
But the question haunted every heart that lived that wonderous night
"whose family have I fixed within my sights?"
It was Christmas in the trenches where the frost so bitter hung.
The frozen fields of France were warmed as songs of peace were sung.
For the walls they'd kept between us to exact the work of war
had been crumbled and were gone for ever more.
My name is Francis Tolliver. In Liverpool I dwell.
Each Christmas come since World War One I've learned it's lessons well.
That the ones who call the shots won't be among the dead and lame
and on each end of the rifle we're the same.

-- John Mccutcheon "Christmas in the trenches"

@edg
my father, as a German, who left highschool in 1937 and did a one-year apprenticeship in our great-grandfather and grandfather's family business, and later was drafted straight into a compulsory Reich Labor Service (digging ditches in Holland among others - I have no idea why)) and then having to serve his military service in 1939 in the Wehrmacht, being stationed in Potsdam-Eiche near Berlin, and being sent direction to Russia later on, he was "officially" a Nazi (not in the NSDAP, not in the SS, and his father, my grandfather being a business man not much into the "hitler" thing) ... he got caught in the war and - considering in what he was caught up in as a German --, he like millions of other Germans 'got what they deserved'. His life story was a very ordinary, not a specific one. He was a Radio operators and Oberfunker in the Wehrmacht the lowest crew rank in the telecommunications associations. And gladly not in something much worse. He survived and today (twenty years after his death in 1997) I understand what his trauma was - I learned it through my son, when he came back from Iraq. As a child me and my siblings really didn't realize what the war had done to my father AND my mother. Because their life stories were all pretty much the same. PTSD was there, but nobody called it that way. It was not used as an excuse for themselves. There simply were no excuses possible or available anymore for them after they learned in detail what had happened in wwII's genocide.

As for comparing the "rough times' people feel they go through when getting in harsh disputes online with some blog companions with what real life disputes can get them into, I always wonder, what the reason it that people's words from anonymous strangers online hurt people almost as much as real life disputes. I mean 'cyber word wars' don't kill your body, may be just the mind. I can't get a grip on all things that anonyouse online communication does to us and how it changes our behavior and attitudes. To me it's a question and sometimes a conflict I like to get a handle on.

Reading the things your father went through in the 1940s should help us all put hurt feelings over inane Internet kerfuffles behind us for at least a few minutes this Christmas season. No matter how bad we think we have it because someone on a blog disagreed with us, our parents and grandparents often had more misery and pain and suffering than we can even imagine. Yet they were still able to sing and laugh and cry and live their lives the best they could.

Peace and joy to you always.