Photo from the Warren Times Mirror Readers of the Warren Times Mirror couldn’t help but be reminded of the war given the layout of the top of the front page in what amounted to what year’s Christmas edition.

Nearly 12 million men and women – including hundreds and hundreds from Warren County – were fighting across the globe.

The Germans had launched the infamous Battle of the Bulge earlier in December.

Casualty lists were getting ever longer. More and more Western Union telegrams were coming to towns across the country like Warren, Youngsville and Spring Creek.

It wasn’t a season of good news and glad tidings.

Photo from the Warren Times Mirror The editorial cartoon from the Dec. 22, 1944 edition of the Warren Times Mirror.

Readers of the Warren Times Mirror were confronted on a daily basis with bold headlines and many stories that provided updates on the war effort both in Europe and in the Pacific.

The editors of the paper, writing in and around Christmas, tried to put their pulse on the feeling of the day.

“We wonder if there are any other three words that awaken as many dreams and memories in American hearts as the simple phrase, ‘Home for Christmas,'” they wrote on Dec. 21.

“Not even the most incurable wanderlust can withstand the homesick vision of the travelers returning to his own door on Christmas Eve. Merely mention the words, and we think immediately of candles in waiting windows; of horse-drawn sleighs hastening toward distant homesteads and of Christmas morning breakfast on the farm with the old folks. Sentimental, to be sure, but that’s Christmas.”

But they were writing to share what they had learned about how that sentimentality was crossing the oceans.

“…(T)he families of millions of young Americans who will be thousands of miles away this Christmas have apparently decided that since Joe or Jane can’t get ‘Home for Christmas’ why, then, ‘home’ must go to them!

“The gift packages mailed overseas last October, we hear, were wrapped inside their cartons just as gaily and brightly as if they were to be opened under the living room tree, instead of in foxholes or Arctic huts. Most families will surely describe the holiday doings in Christmas Day letters and, as far as we’ve been able to make out, nearly every Christmas card going overseas will carry with it familiar and beloved touches of Christmas at home.”

Something about how families operated during this time struck the editorial writer.

“The ‘homing instinct’ … makes the American family what it is has rarely been so well served as by the trend we’ve noticed in this year’s Christmas cards — traditional designs of home-and-fireside that reflect all the joyous Christmas times we’ve ever known, and sentiments that speak simply and affectionately, like a familiar voice, of the love and happiness that await the great day of homecoming.

“lf these gifts, letters and sentimental remembrances help bring even a few moments of home’s happiness

to those overseas, then there is little more blessing we should feel entitled to ask of Christmas, 1944.”

An article in the Dec. 26 edition reminded readers, though, that the sentiment of the holidays for an ever-increasing number of families was that of an empty chair. And not one that would be reclaimed once the war was over, whenever that moment might come.

The paper included a story – “Sad Message Is Received At Sheffield” – in the Dec. 26 edition that proves that.

“The Christmas season has been a saddened one for additional county families with the arrival of War Department telegrams concerning loved ones on overseas fronts,” the story said.

“Mr. and Mrs. Louie Peroski, 58 Keystone avenue, Sheffield, were notified that their son, Pfc. Mike Peroski, was killed in action on December 7 in France. Mr. and Mrs. Silas Harrington, of Pittsfield, received a message stating that their son, William, with the fleet in the South Pacific, had been killed in action, and the brothers and sisters of Pfc. Gerald A. Smith, of Starbrick, were informed he has been reported missing in action since November 14.”

Death kept coming.

But the editorial writer on Dec. 22 tried to put that unique moment in world history in some kind of relatable context with a column entitled “ON EARTH, PEACE.”

“Throughout the world Americans once more are celebrating Christmas, in their own homes and churches, before the altars of strange churches in strange lands, on tropic beaches and snowy battlefields at barracks and hospitals and prison camps.

“For a little time their immediate feelings of anxiety or pain or loneliness will be crowded out by the emotions

of love and fellowship which Christmas always kindles. Wherever thee are there will be the old carols, and the

old familiar story with its triumphant hymn of the angelic host ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good wall toward men.'”

The column notes that humanity has “struggled over the centuries to transmute those words into reality. And two thousand years of failure made better by this present and most tragic failure (World War II), cannot erase the hope that those words arouse.”

While this sounds heady and philosophical, the writer didn’t mean it that way.

“Today the (struggle) is not symbolical but fiercely literal,” they wrote. “The war is in a real sense a crusade. For the Christian world is battling cruel and pagan enemies whose goal has been the destruction of peace and good will and the substitution of a slavery of body and spirit masquerading as some thing called Prosperity and the New Order.

“That threat is being averted, and peace will be won.”

But what then?

“With it must come goodwill, for the one cannot exist without the other,” they argued.

“Never in the history of Christendom has that fact been more apparent than now, and never have the people of Christendom been more actively, acutely determined that peace shall be built upon an enduring foundation of good will.”

There was no illusion that would come easy.

“It is a task as hard as war itself, in which men’s good will must overcome their fallibility,” the writer said. “It will need leaders as wise and courageous as those who have led our armies.

“‘On earth peace, good will toward men.’ The wonder of it is not that the Christian world has failed of achieving that blessing but that it is still bravely trying to fulfill that promise through blood and toil and faith.”