Seventy years ago I enjoyed my first Christmas in the United States. It was a big, colourful, family occasion with much music from our host family. For many evacuees from Britain that 1940 Christmas was one of the most abiding impressions from their years away as hosts did their best to make up for the absence of parents.
Ten years later I had another Christmas in the U.S., this time in Los Angeles. I was one of the stage crew who celebrated together with the international cast of a musical, Jotham Valley, the true story of two Western brothers who solved a feud in Arizona. However I nearly caused a feud that day. We were all staying in a large building, a former women's club, and each of the national groups decorated a particular room. The British were given the library and we made a good traditional job of it. The Norwegians decorated the sloping balustrade of stairs at the end of the big hall. They artfully suspended a skier in a re-enactment of Oslo's Holmenkollen jump. During the night I slipped down and put a Union Jack on the back of the skier. This early Eddy the Eagle was not appreciated by the Norwegians!
Erica and I have been fortunate to celebrate Christmas in many countries on different continents and in many different ways. In pre-independent Nigeria where I lived in the days when supplies in the shops came by sea we had to do without traditional decorations. Thanks to a dock strike in London, they all arrived in March. In Hong Kong we were invited to a Christmas dinner by an elderly Chinese gentleman who had never forgotten the care given him by my father when they were at school together in London. We were met by a Rolls Royce and taken to the Hong Kong Hilton where this esteemed family patriarch presided over a dinner with probably 30 of his family. In Bonn on the Rhine we celebrated with a German veteran and his family who kindly arranged for us to hear the Queen's Christmas day broadcast. It started with ‘God save the Queen’ and I remember my father insisting that everyone, Germans included, should stand.
One Christmas we were at the Initiatives of Change conference centre at Caux, Switzerland. There is at Caux a beautiful Protestant church on the mountain side. When we went up everything was green. When we came out of the church everything was pristine white. I remember that evening well, not for a spiritual reason but because I offered my arm to a Nigerian lady on the slippery slope. With the result that I managed to pull us both down into the snow.
In my book Ice in Every Carriage* – copies of which have, incidentally, just come into the Devon library system – I describe what was perhaps my most unusual and profound Christmas. It was in Delhi in 1952, again backstage with the musical Jotham Valley. We were 200 people from 25 countries staying in Jaipur House, made available by Prime Minister Nehru. We were on tour with four stage plays for eight months in South Asia. We were led by Frank Buchman, a remarkable American Christian minister. At short notice he suggested we put on a musical play The Cowboy's Christmas written by a Canadian member of our group, Cece Broadhurst. This involved a lot of work through Christmas Eve for crew and cast as we had not expected to put it on. At the heart of the play was his carol 'A new world beginning from tonight', later popularized by Sir Malcolm Sargent, in his annual Christmas concerts in the Albert Hall.
I describe in Ice in Every Carriage the way the Regal cinema was packed out with people of all backgrounds including many diplomats and MPs and the programme which included our cast singing the Hallelujah Chorus. Carols were sung in three groups, with the chorus standing on stools and holding red and white candles on a darkened stage. What gratified Buchman most was what happened at the end. The Cowboy's Christmas concluded with a pageant of the Christ Child in a modern setting, with an exquisite tableau of the Mother and Child, with three little Indian children walking up to the stable to gaze at them. The curtain was kept open as people from the predominantly Hindu audience, for 20 minutes walked reverently to the stage, some even coming in off the street to kneel or salaam before the Mother and Child.
'I used to think of Christmas as a drunken orgy,' one distinguished Indian commented to a cast member, 'I begin to understand what it is all about.' One Hindu said afterwards, 'It gives me an absolutely fresh idea what Christians are meant to be like' and another, 'Now I see that Christmas is not just for Christians, it is for everyone.'
Michael Henderson is a journalist, broadcaster and author of eleven books including No Enemy To Conquer - Forgiveness in An Unforgiving World and See You After the Duration - the Story of British Evacuees to North America in World War II. He has been a TV presenter, a broadcaster and for more than fifty years worked for peace and understanding in some 25 countries. He recently (2010) returned to his native England after 22 years in the USA.
NOTE: Individuals of many cultures, nationalities, religions, and beliefs are actively involved with Initiatives of Change. These commentaries represent the views of the writer and not necessarily those of Initiatives of Change as a whole.
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