A Wartime Christmas, compiled by Maria and Andrew Hubert
Alan Sutton Publishing has a series of these "Christmas anthologies," the first which I bought at a book sale several years ago, and I try to pick up inexpensive copies when I can find them. Most of them concentrate on a certain shire or area in England, but there are a handful, like A Dickens Christmas and A Bronte Christmas that are set around an era instead. This is their World War II volume, and, predictably for the subject, it is in an oversize trade-paper format.
The contributions cover a varied range of subjects: the memories of children evacuated to the country, tales of trying to produce a typical Christmas feast with rationed food and sweets, stories of overseas celebrations (from soldiers putting on a raucous impromptu pantomime of Aladdin to men existing on meager portions as POWs), soldiers able to spend Christmas in Bethlehem and those assigned to long days in Iceland. There are several memories from Polish men who eventually came to England to join the RAF and who were one of "the few" who stood against Hitler in the Battle of Britain, and at least one memory of POWs attending church on Christmas Day to no acrimony.
The volume includes cartoons, vintage photographs, wartime recipes and peeks into recipe books of the time, old advertisements—and, typically for any English Christmas compilation, a ghost story!
If you are an Anglophile and Christmas fan, you owe it to yourself to check out these Sutton volumes!
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