To be home for Christmas

The U.S. Army and American Christmas Traditions

Christmas in America is a big deal. Roughly 9 in 10 Americans celebrate the holiday in some fashion. Christmas specials, such as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, A Charlie Brown Christmas, and How the Grinch Stole Christmas, dominate screens during December, as they have for the past sixty years, through both broadcast and digital eras. And hundreds of billions of dollars are spent on gifts.

Christmas also looms large throughout the U.S. Army’s history. From Washington crossing the Delaware on Christmas Day 1776 to the ongoing Operations Santa Claus (at multiple installations), the Army has never lacked for Christmas spirit. It also features prominently in civil-military relations—bringing soldiers home for Christmas has been a consistent goal for the Commander-in-Chief whenever the nation is at war.

When Santa’s sleigh breaks down, he’s got a UH-60 helicopter as backup. Source: DVIDS.¹

Yet it is not just that Christmas features prominently in Army history and operations, the Army has actively influenced the ways Americans celebrate the holiday as well. For example, as Lorraine Boissoneault writes for Smithsonian Magazine, the dominant image of Santa—the jolly old man with bushy beard, red and white garments, and a sack full of toys—comes from cartoons drawn by Thomas Nast to recruit for the Army during the Civil War and promote the Army’s needs more generally. Nast gave us much of the iconography associated with Christmas, and it often featured the Army, as shown in the Christmas Eve print below.

Thomas Nast Christmas Eve print. Source: Library of Congress.²

It’s not just the sights of Christmas where we can see the Army’s fingerprints, but in the sounds as well. “I’ll be home for Christmas”, one of the most popular Christmas songs of all time, came out in 1943 and was intended to speak to soldiers and their families separated by World War II. More broadly, as Joanna Guldin notes on Military.com, the Army (and other services) has powered the success of many of the most notable Christmas hits over the years.

If you are interested in the Army and Christmas music, here is the West Point Band’s 2023 Holiday Show (starting at 18:40).

The Army is thus a little bit everywhere with Christmas. It might not have the live-action feel of NORAD’s Santa-tracker, but the Army’s influence is both deep and broad with the secular dimensions of the holiday. And this story will continue to play out so long as there are people out there donning red and white suits and pulling on white beards to spread presents and joy on Christmas.

Merry Christmas everyone from Army 250! We will be back with our weekly newsletter in a couple of weeks.

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Additional Resources:

1. Task & Purpose has an interesting piece on Santa and all the places he has gone with the military.

2. You can see a broad array of military operations associated with Christmas here.

3. Take the Department of Defense’s “It Happened on Christmas” quiz here.

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1. The appearance of U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) visual information does not imply or constitute DoD endorsement.

2. Nast was an epic cartoonist who created many of the most enduring imagery associated with American politics, to include cementing the donkey and elephant as mascots for Democrats and Republicans respectively.