By Dan Shine
Voice Columnist
I’ll be Home for Christmas
I’ll be home for Christmas
You can count on me
Please have snow and mistletoe
And presents on the tree
Christmas Eve will find me
Where the love-light gleams
I’ll be home for Christmas
If only in my dreams
Bing Crosby, 1943
Every GI had a special memory of that song; in father’s case, it just made him shiver.
Like most American boys of a certain age, Bob Shine spent Christmas 1944 overseas and at war. For him, that Christmas morning was spent in battle, and that Christmas night was spent in a snowy foxhole, with frozen feet. In the days before Christmas, he had thought wistfully of that song, and America, and home, never knowing just what lay ahead for him.
On Christmas Eve, as the hour approached midnight, Shine and the entire 75th Infantry Division found themselves racing to the front lines, and being hurled into a desperate battle. As Christmas day dawned, the boys of the 75th division—their average age was nineteen—helped turn back a mighty German offensive in what would later be called the Battle of the Bulge. That night, Shine dug his foxhole in the frozen Belgian earth, and slept in the snow. And he thought of the friends he had lost that day: friends who would never be going home to celebrate another Christmas; and throughout the cold, dark night, he wondered if that Christmas would be his last.
By the time Christmas 1945 arrived, the war was over. Many of the surviving American servicemen had returned home, but Shine was still in Europe with the occupation forces, and so he missed yet another Christmas at home.
At last, in the spring of 1946, he returned to the States via troop ship, was mustered out of the army, and made his way back to West Haven via train and trolley.
When he finally arrived at the family home on Union Avenue, his mother was there to welcome him. There in the living room stood the skeleton of the Christmas tree from the previous December, and there was hardly a needle left on it. Underneath the tree were all of the family’s gifts, still wrapped as if waiting for Christmas morning. Smiling, and with a tear in her eye, his mother explained, “We decided that just this once, Christmas could wait awhile. Merry Christmas, Bobby; welcome home!”
For after all, Christmas is more than a place on the calendar–it’s a place in the heart.
Merry Christmas!