While this seemingly miraculous event is widely known and well-documented, it gives rise to reflection on the ways holidays, especially religious holidays, can nurture peace across cultures. To be sure, not every holiday fosters peace. Consider the disputes in the United States over statues of confederate generals or militaristic parades and ceremonies that punctuate the calendars of many nations. That fact will bring us, later in these reflections, to the question of norms for holidays that do foster peace and, with that, the question not just of the meaning of holidays, but of their truth. For now, reflection on the first Christmas truce is in order.
A holiday, most simply, is a time set, by civil or religious authorities, for festivals and recreation. Yet, that simple meaning hardly captures the depth of the human need for holidays to ritually mark time. Religious holidays are especially profound since they usually link death, as a horizon of human time, to some reality beyond the reach of finite death. On the Western Front, with death ever present, a new possibility for human time, a possibility of reconciliation among enemies, found expression in Christmas. Not only Christ's presence among us in a cradle, as the story goes, but also his eventual entombment, and then new reality, cast human time not as a horrific war of each against each.
What is more, the German and British soldiers, knowingly or not, enacted the way holidays and rituals touch basic human needs: the sharing of food; the sharing of carols that express the meaning of Christmas, human hope, and the endless human search for meaning in understanding how holy events weave across time, language, and culture; and the forging of human bonds. That, in the recesses of the human heart, is a longing for peace despite the horrid facts of war and death. More than that, a holiday can, and in this case did, affirm those basic needs and their goods in the face of their denial: gnawing hunger, unrelenting fear, meaningless death, the babble of languages, and the pitch of peoples against peoples. In this respect, religious holidays, if they are truly holy, not only affirm the goodness of life, but also act as protests against all that demeans and destroys the fragile adventure of life.
The question then becomes, what makes a holiday humanly possible? That is, what is it about human existence, our personal and social lives, that supports or enables holidays to speak to and even resolve the problems that beset people? This is not a question of the origin of a holiday. Origins are matters of assumed divine action (consider the Angels singing to ancient shepherds about a messiah), religious authority (marking December 25 as Christmas on the Gregorian calendar), or civil authority (setting Veterans Day). But, those origins depend, for their intelligibility and meaning, on something about the human condition. Reflecting on the soccer games played on the Western Front opens three interrelated domains of meaning, in increasing depth and importance, about the human condition and the truth of genuine holidays.
One domain of meaning is that the possibility of reconciliation—among individuals, peoples, and even with the divine—is written into human existence. Throughout the ages much has been written, and rightly so, about human conflict, revenge, and dehumanization. Yet, it is also the case that human beings are creatures that can, in certain situations, triumph over division, forgive, repent, and reconcile one with another. This oddly human capacity is often given structure in law courts, truth and reconciliation commissions, and rituals of repentance. But, that capacity is also given form in holidays, especially religious holidays. The filthy boots kicking soccer balls on a battlefield gave physical form to the reconciliation proclaimed in Christmas as a distinctive possibility of human existence. The condition of war, the clash of human beings, then, is a denial of humanity and not the truth of our existence. Human life always reaches out beyond the brutality of mere finite life and the numbing passage of moments ending in death.
One mark of a true religious holiday, then, is that it enacts and makes real the human possibility of reconciliation. Yet, if that is so, another domain of meaning is opened for reflection on the truth of holidays. Theologians and philosophers have long, and in various ways, characterized human beings: rational, social, animals; creatures in the image of God; beings without an "essence" and so free to define themselves; explorers and adventurers; and so on. What holidays show is that human beings are also, whatever else they are, valuing creatures, beings moved by love and care. We ponder the meaning of things and experiences, but only because we value them; we make sense of our perceptions, our regrets, and our hopes because we value them. In fact, societies are bound together by shared valuations and common cares. Of course, this fact is also the factory of war when social valuations clash or self-love demeans regard for others. What then?
Importantly, holidays show that human care and valuing weave love of self and love of others with the veneration of time. Holidays could not exist and would not be set in time if people did not value their timeliness itself, and human time is inseparably personal and social. We mark our present with memories of the past and reach with anticipation into the future. Our lives are embedded in communities that exist before us and after us (we assume) and shape our present experience. A true holiday, then, must enact the fact of shared human time. One's own life makes no sense without others' values (a truth ardent egoists do not understand); any community cannot devalue personal life and expect to endure into the future (a truth tyrants and collectivists fail to grasp). These are the truths the soldiers on the Western Front knew in the midst of, and in spite of, the horror around them. A true holiday must, then, bind together shared human lifetimes through shared and life-sustaining values.
We have explored domains of meaning found in holidays, especially religious ones, that enable us to identify features that make an event, festival, or celebration a true holiday. On seeing that fact, another domain of meaning opens for reflection, also bound to the condition of human time. The human future, it would seem, is open to interwoven realities. It is open, most obviously, to death, to the end of finite existence, and, if we follow cosmologists and physicists, the cold death or cosmic crunch of the universe. Finite, in this sense, is a condition of all human possibilities; we are not, as finite beings, immortal.
However, is finitude only a condition of possibility for itself? Obviously, the finite universe is also home to human beings, whose finitude does not seem to be their only condition of possible experience. In fact, humans are creatures of hope, imagination, and anticipation that can and do reach beyond the finite limits of existence. And this, too, is a condition of possibility for holidays. Why celebrate in festivals and rituals if death is the master of all? Why sing carols on a bloody battlefield if the truth of one's existence is merely the blood and mud? Remember, the question here is not the origin of holidays, or human hope, or the imagination. The question is about the conditions of human experience that make holidays possible. From that perspective, it is hard to make sense of holidays if we are only death-bound creatures, although we are that as well. Here, too, it seems, the soldiers on the front understood a profound truth.
Here, then, is another marker of a true holiday. Namely, that without denial of death and its sting, a true holiday nestles death within a wider horizon. And that wider horizon, we might now see, makes possible shared values and human reconciliation. What is more, it shows us that true holidays are a prism through which to interpret human life not reducible to the dyadic nature of human conflict. All conflict, all warfare, is one against another no matter how large and diverse the combatants: civil wars, nations at war, the Axis and Allied Powers, tribal and gang wars, world wars, cold wars. Holidays are mediators among combatants seeking, as we have seen, reconciliation, shared common values, and hope. In this way, true holidays are instruments of peace.
While it was only fleeting, mere hours in a day, the soldiers on the Western Front in 1914 testified through their celebration to the true work of holidays. It is the work of mediation whose point and purpose are peace.
