Well, it is now 3:00 p.m., Sunday, the 24th of December. I am holding down the fort at the office this afternoon and thought a post would be in order, so here it is. If I didn’t know otherwise, I would think this is just another day. Perhaps I’ll get more of the Christmas spirit as the evening progresses.
The weather is not very Christmas-sy today. It is rather nice for a winter day, though, in Ireland. Not even rain and/or wind. No cases of sun stroke or sun burn have been reported yet, for that matter. I would like to see it snow about two feet over night. Without the snow, it just isn’t Christmas.
I will be spending a very quiet and uneventful Christmas Eve. I’ll work until five, eat my supper, go to the show with Harvey and Mac and Jack (who got out of the hospital yesterday). Then we’ll all go to the Aero Club and eat and drink and talk until about midnight. Then I’ll return to the barrack, dig my bed out of the mountain of beer bottles, and hit the sack, provided, of course, that someone hasn’t mistaken it for the gutter and fell into it first. Boys will be boys, especially on Xmas Eve. I think I’ll go on a spree tonight and have three cokes. John has moved to a different part of camp now and I haven’t been able to locate any card players lately.
All those nice parcels I got from Mom and Dad gave me many a pleasant surprise. I don’t think there was anything I enjoyed more than that Delicious apple. They certainly melt in one’s mouth. This one was mellow. I’m always boasting about our Washington apples and would like to have shown this big red one to Doris and the others. But she would have wanted it, and, after all, there’s a limit to friendship. So I ate the damn thing before I could get any more silly ideas. I had that paper pail of nuts around for weeks before I “discovered” that apple. What I wouldn’t give for a box or two of those!
That fruit cake was delicious, as were the Nabisco cookies. If there’s any more of that stuff available, I hope Mom will snap it up and send it to some boys in the service, me, for instance. I would never have believed it possible, but most of the Xmas supplies I had stored here and there have disappeared. Termites? No, that couldn’t be because they eat wood. The mice, maybe? At times they have threatened to take over the place. It’s not a question of keeping them from eating our stuff, because they always get it in the end. But we do make them work for it. You should see some of our ingenious schemes for putting things out of their reach. By the way, I wonder how Cleon is making out with the ants?
As I told Bonnie in my letter Thursday, the mail situation has eased up and a few letters have come. Makes a nice Xmas present for us because some of the fellows were getting desperate and threatened to stop writing home. But they talked me out of it.
It was a problem to decide where I was going to have my Christmas dinner. I suppose the best dinners tomorrow in the British Isles will be served right in our Army mess halls. But it is only a dinner, after all, and we sometimes tire of eating at the mess hall. Also, the Red Cross in Belfast will be serving free turkey dinners tomorrow that will be quite good. However, since the Presses have been good enough to invite me to their home for dinner, the thing has been solved. Harvey will be going there, and a friend of mine that we call Gus (he is from Arizona and his wife is now living in Idaho). I guess Gus pulled some strings in order to get coupons from the Army for the three of us. We will give them to the Presses. They’ve probably gone without meat, butter, etc. for a week in order to give this dinner for us boys. The rationing over here is murder, believe me. Of course, these people have never eaten the way we do in the United States. So much of their food has always been imported, was therefore always high in price and beyond the reach of much of the working class of people. No one in the U.S. realizes the extent of the difference between our standard of living and that of these people. And at that, the British are better off and have been better off in past years than the continental Europeans.
I may be over here for quite some time yet, but some day I’ll be going back. These people are stuck here! (My morale has just gone up 5 points).
[letterstohome copyright 2008]