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This is what Zehmisch Senior recorded for Christmas Day, 1914: "A couple of Britons brought a ball along from their trenches, and a lively game began. How fantastically wonderful and strange. The English officers experienced it like that too -- that thanks to soccer and Christmas, the feast of love, deadly enemies briefly came together as friends."

for several days -- the enemies made a spontaneous peace

"We all grew up with the story of soldiers from both sides putting down their arms on Christmas Day," says Prince William, president of the English Football Association.

Here’s how it generally went down, according to Stephen Nissenbaum in his book “The Battle for Christmas.” On Christmas Day, the lower classes would dress up in strange costumes to “invert” their roles: Men would dress up as women, young boys as bishops, and the lowliest peasant or the town drunk might be declared the “Lord of Misrule.”

They would gather into a mob and go around to the houses and estates of the well-to-do, making a racket, singing bawdy songs and demanding entry. Amazingly, most of the time they were let in and given alcohol, food and even money. There was gambling and promiscuity (often leading to marriages at the end of the misrule). Once the mob was satisfied, it would move on to the next rich person’s estate.

If it seems surprising that rich people would willingly let a drunken mob in their homes and get them even drunker, that’s because the alternative was worse. If a homeowner tried to block entry, the mob would break in, destroy property, assault the homeowner, frighten his wife and children, and then take the food and drink anyway.

said in his Christmas Eve homily in Vatican City that a world often obsessed with gifts, feasting and self-centredness needed more humility.

“Jesus was born rejected by some and regarded by many others with indifference,” he said. “Today also the same indifference can exist, when Christmas becomes a feast where the protagonists are ourselves, rather than Jesus; when the lights of commerce cast the light of God into the shadows; when we are concerned for gifts, but cold toward those who are marginalised.”

“This worldliness has taken Christmas hostage. It needs to be freed.”

In the hundred years since, the event has been seen as a kind of miracle, a rare moment of peace just a few months into a war that would eventually claim over 15 million lives.

But what actually happened on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day of 1914 — and did they really play soccer on the battlefield?

Most accounts suggest the truce began with carol singing from the trenches on Christmas Eve

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — The International Space Station accepted its first U.S. shipment in more than half a year early Wednesday, receiving Christmas presents and much-needed groceries for the resident astronauts.

"There's much rejoicing on the ground," Mission Control radioed.

NASA astronaut Kjell Lindgren (CHELL LEND-grin) used the space station's big robot arm to grab the capsule and its 3 ½ tons of cargo. The operation went smoothly, thanks to all the practice Lindgren put in. He operated the crane via joy sticks, joking earlier this week, "I knew those hours playing video games would come in handy!"

The day after Christmas, millions of Americans will lose their jobless benefits, according to a new study.

"Congress is set to cut off 12 million Americans from the only thing holding them back from falling into financial wreckage and disaster," says Andrew Stettner, a co-author of the new study from the progressive-leaning think tank the Century Foundation.

"Those will come to a crashing halt on Dec. 26, the day after Christmas," Stettner says. He says this is happening just as the pandemic is raging across the country and states and cities are reimposing restrictions on businesses and schools.

This fall, even as cases surged across Europe, Germany worked hard to keep schools open, prioritizing them over other aspects of daily life like restaurants and bars.

On Wednesday, German schools will close along with nonessential stores and services as part of a strict lockdown that will be in effect through Christmas.

“The numbers were so out of control that German leaders decided they had to lock everything down, even schools,” said Melissa Eddy, a Times correspondent in Berlin.

Francis, who turned 82 this month, said that without fraternity, “even our best plans and projects risk being soulless and empty”. He called for that spirit among individuals of “every nation and culture” as well as among people “with different ideas, yet capable of respecting and listening to one another”. “Our differences, then, are not a detriment or a danger; they are a source of richness,” Francis said.

“In our day, for many people, life’s meaning is found in possessing, in having an excess of material objects. “An insatiable greed marks all human history, even today, when, paradoxically, a few dine luxuriantly while all too many go without the daily bread needed to survive.” The birth of Christ pointed to a new way to live “not by devouring and hoarding, but by sharing and giving”, he said. We “must not lose our footing or slide into worldliness and consumerism”, he said.

People should ask themselves: “Do I really need all these material objects and complicated recipes for living? Can I manage without all these unnecessary extras and live a life of greater simplicity?

Before we leave the centenary year of the outbreak of war in 1914 there’s someone we should talk about. Everyone now knows about the famous Christmas truce and football matches. But this was a war that was meant to have been “over by Christmas” 1914, not dragging on for four blood-soaked years. Plenty share blame for that, but one major culprit who seems to have been conspicuous by his absence in 2014 deserves a name check: Otto von Bismarck.

What Germans got instead was a militarised monarchical autocracy sustained by rampant nationalism and supported by intellectuals of all kinds – sociologist Max Weber later repented his enthusiasm – who should have known better. Parliament was marginalised, the parties manipulated against each other, and Bismarck threatened to resign whenever he was seriously challenged. It was outrageous and it ended in the ruins of Berlin of 1945.

After its humiliations at the hands of Napoleon, 19th century Prussia’s was – even more than under Frederick the Great – a conscious process of self-aggrandisement. Plenty resisted the trend and Bismarck’s “iron and blood” exposition of his realpolitik ambitions in 1862 nearly got him fired before he started. He was not charismatic, soft-spoken, even hesitant, but utterly dominant over his king and even the powerful military, which privately mocked his weakness for uniforms. Try this interview with his biographer Jonathan Steinberg for a flavour of him. “This man means what he says,” Benjamin Disraeli concluded. Scary.

hristianity is the most widely practiced religion in the world, with more than 2 billion followers.

The Christian faith centers on beliefs regarding the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Christians are monotheistic, i

Sometime in recent history, possibly around 2004, Americans forgot to have fun, true fun, as though they’d misplaced it like a sock.

Instead, fun evolved into work, sometimes more than true work, which is where we find ourselves now.

Fun is often emphatic, exhausting, scheduled, pigeonholed, hyped, forced and performative

Amri is also the latest suspect to have emerged from a disconcerting counterterrorism gap in both Europe and the United States.

In case after case — including that of the German Christmas market attack — authorities have come forward after the fact to say that they had enough cause to place the suspect under surveillance well before the violence. But never enough to move in for an arrest.

“This kind of super-low-tech, improvised thing is hard,” said Rafael Bossong, research associate at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. “The guy didn’t buy any weapons. He didn’t give off absolutely clear signals. The question is, how do you definitely prevent that?”

New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan GrishamMichelle Lynn Lujan GrishamCapitol Christmas tree lights up Washington Here are 16 places celebrating Indigenous Peoples Day for the first time this year New Mexico releases plan to provide free college to all state residents: report MORE (D) on Tuesday signed into law a measure that grants courts the permission to authorize temporary seizures of guns from individuals deemed to be a threat to themselves or others.Grisham said in a statement that the so-called red flag law would reduce the state’s “unacceptable suicide rate and other forms of gun violence.”

The office added that the law would address the “unconscionably high” per capita rates of firearm deaths and suicide in the state. The firearm death rate in New Mexico was 18.5 per 100,000 people in 2017, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"Citizens have a right to bear arms and we cannot circumvent that right when they have not even committed a crime or even been accused of committing one," he wrote. "'Shall not be infringed' is a very clear and concise component of an Amendment that our forefathers felt was important enough to be recognized immediately following freedom of speech and religion."

The coronavirus crisis could not have been more cunningly engineered to expose Mr Johnson’s flaws. He was made prime minister not because anyone thought that he was a cool and decisive head with the leadership skills and moral seriousness required to handle the gravest public health emergency in a century.

He was put there because he was a successful representative of the entertainer branch of populist leadership that prospered in the pre-virus era. “We elected him to be a ‘good times’ prime minister,” comments one senior Tory. “His curse is to be prime minister in bad times.”

The wrong criticism of his performance is to say that he has made mistakes. Confronted with a novel disease for which the country was unprepared, any prime minister would have made errors. The correct criticism is that he has failed to learn from his mistakes and egregiously repeated them.

Christmas of 2021: According to both President Biden and Dr. Anthony Fauci, together the two most prominent voices on public health in America right now, that’s when we can hope for a return to normalcy, the beginning of life after the emergency.

A variant that is more infectious and much more vaccine or immunity-resistant could alter this timeline. But the leading candidate for that role, the South African variant, appears at least somewhat vulnerable to the vaccines that we already have. And even in South Africa itself, it only appears to have caused a temporary spike in cases, followed by a swift decline.

At that point, with herd immunity close and vaccines generally available, the arguments marshaled by Covid skeptics and lockdown critics, which have been mostly wrong or misguided up till now, will begin to make more sense.