OP-ED: The letter: A Christmas gift from 1943
Editor’s note: This column originally appeared in 2024.
“Here it is Christmas Day,” my future father-in-law wrote to his family in Uniontown in the middle of World War II. Cpl. Bob Reynolds was stationed “somewhere in India” with the 25th Field Hospital, U.S. Army.
“In a couple of hours,” Bob wrote, “it will all be over: My first Christmas overseas and my second Christmas away from home. While I am writing this letter I am thinking of you at home. It’s ten o’clock here in India, and the end of a very busy Christmas Eve.”
Bob Reynolds was 21 years old, and though he didn’t know it, he had already lived half his life. He would die just 19 years later, in 1962, while on a camping trip with his family, which included his wife, Mary, his youngest daughter, Robbie, and his oldest child, 13-year-old Barbara, my future wife.
Her father’s death was the defining event of Barbara’s life. We lost her to cancer in 2017.
A couple of weeks ago, while looking for something else, I found my father-in-law’s letter to his parents, Oneal and Myra Reynolds, of 73 Millview Street, Uniontown.
The letter is dated December 25, 1943.
Was there ever a lonelier and scarier Christmastime? Maybe, though Christmas 1943 ranks high up there. It was a little more than two years since the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and America’s sons and daughters were serving their country and putting their lives on the line around the globe.
The distance of Uniontown to “somewhere in India” is somewhat more than 8,000 miles. But to Bob, family was close at hand.
“There at home your Christmas Day is just beginning,” the young corporal wrote. “The girls” – his sisters, Shirley, 11, and Peggy, 14 – “are all excited and happy because Old Saint Nick has made his rounds.”
Bob realized that “because they are big girls” his sisters no longer believed in that most magical of Christmas tales. He recalled that several years earlier he had “scrapped” together enough money to buy Shirley and Peggy dolls for the holiday.
“Then the next Christmas they had grown out of dolls and wrist watches made their eyes pop. But now they are so grown up, I don’t know what would make their Christmas a merry one.
“They are the sweetest little sisters. God bless their little hearts.
“They’ll be ladies and have boyfriends before you know it,” Bob told his parents. “For all I know, maybe they are now.”
My wife’s aunts, Shirley and Peggy, are gone now. They were wonderful people and perfect aunts.
Bob imagined his parents on Christmas morning. “I picture Dad- he’s just finished making buckwheat cakes.” With a cup of coffee in hand, Dad Reynolds settles in front of the fireplace with the family dog, Pal Buttons, at his feet.
About the dog, Bob reminds his dad, “You always called him ‘old foller tail’ because he follows you from one room to the next.”
Bob pictured his mom sitting before the fire with tears in her eyes, “thinking of your five boys. Charles, your baby boy,” Nennie, Jack, and the twins, Bob and Bill.
Myra’s four oldest sons all served during the war. On Christmas Day 1943 only Bob and Bill were overseas. Bill was attached to the 82nd Airborne Division. “I don’t know where Bill is,” Bob wrote, “but I guess he is either in Sicily or somewhere in Italy … Mom, wherever he is, he’s alright.”
On Christmas Eve, Bob and his fellow soldiers at the 25th Field Hospital saw the movie “Holiday Inn,” with “Bing Crosby singing all the songs of all the holidays year-round.” One song was “White Christmas.”
“We all enjoyed the movie,” Bob told his folks, “but the songs kind of made us blue because they were the songs we all sang around home” before the war.
“After the show, we came back to camp, and around a camp fire, we sang all the favorite Christmas carols, told jokes, and let our minds wander back home to you folks.”
Some of this, maybe all of this, seems strange now. We are far removed from the dangerous year 1943. As a country, we are not the same people.
Bob touched on the significance of Christmas, with a wartime twist.
“Mom,” Bob wrote, “do you know what the first star of evening symbolizes? It’s God’s service star. His son, Jesus, is in the service, too. It’s his duty to look out for us boys.”
Bob signed off: “May we all be together soon – one big happy Christmas family.”
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.