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Elinor Florence (Company name) Elinor Florence

Wartime Christmas

From my house to yours, here’s a virtual stocking filled with seven Christmas stories for your reading pleasure.

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The Christmas season was especially lonely for the homesick men and women serving overseas in wartime, as well as their families on the home front. Here are just a few examples of the many thousands of Christmas cards and letters that winged their way between loved ones in both world wars. When I went searching for images […]

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For hundreds of thousands of families around the world, 1945 marked the first happy Christmas celebrated together after the sad and lonely years of war. After the war ended in May 1945, it took months to transport all those men and women home again, and some didn’t arrive until just before Christmas. My own father, who […]

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I saved this topic for Christmas Eve, simply because it is so inspirational. The rebuilding of the bombed Church of Our Lady in Dresden, Germany, is a heart-warming example of renewal and redemption. Please look at the before and after pictures to see what I mean. I don’t want to discuss the controversy surrounding the bombing of Dresden, Germany, which took […]

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Imagine saying goodbye to your husband or son, knowing that you will not see his face or hear his voice for years — maybe forever. That’s why mail was absolutely critical during wartime, both for the boys over there and the folks back home. And never more so than at Christmas. I assume the RCAF pilot […]

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A few years before he died, I asked my father what was the best Christmas he could remember. I expected him to recall his childhood, or a time when his own children were young. But without hesitation, he said: “Christmas 1945!” I asked him why, and here’s the story he told me, in his own […]

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