Merry Christmas from the Family is the holiday song that makes me laugh. Christmas in the Trenches is the one that makes me misty and then some. John McCutcheon turns a true story into a real tear-jerker with a message.
Two versions: Straight recent live performance …
and older live performance with back story and period pictures.
Was a big McCutcheon fan back in college days. Good to see that this favorite is still popular, at least on the YouTubes.
Craig, I’ve never heard that song before. I’m sitting here with tears running down my cheeks – I don’t have a family member deployed, but I’m thinking of my dad who spent many Christmases away from family, in China, Korea and Viet Nam. This Christmas, he’ll be looking down on us from the safest place he could be.
What a beautiful song, beautifully sung with a powerful message – would that more people lived it.
I love that song and haven’t heard it for a long time. I am a collector of obituaries, so I am sitting here with a copy of the NYT obit of Alfred Anderson, the last survivor of the 1914 Christmas Truce. At the time of the truce, he was 18 years old and a member of the Black Watch regiment. Anderson died at age 109 in 2005.
Anderson said in an interview in 2003, “I remember the silence, the eerie sound of silence. All I’d heard for two months in the trenches was the hissing, cracking and whining of bullets in flight … but there was dead silence that morning, right across the land as far as you could see.”
One of my treasured possessions is a brass tin given to all the English soldiers by Princess Mary for Christmas 1914. They were filled cigarettes and treats. Imagine — a beautiful little hinged brass box! No one had any idea what was in store for those poor soldiers no matter which side …
Very nice. Merci.
That is quite a song. I had a grandfather in WWII and a brother-in-law in Iraq.