There's a problem with the Christmas spirit. You've noticed how it passes?

One of the most striking illustrations of this comes from a story told to me many years ago by an old German man. He fought with the German forces in the First World War. For the benefit of the thirtysomething people, I'll remind you that in those days warfare was not high tech but hand-to-hand trench warfare. Soldiers lived, fought, and died in trenches full of mud and blood and vermin. In those trenches, dug in the fields of France, enemies could actually hear each other talking. They didn't need satellites to locate the enemy. The enemy was just over there.

This old gentleman told me how on one cold, moonlit Christmas Eve, he huddled in the bottom of the trench. Because of the annual Christmas truce, the fighting had stopped. Suddenly, from the British trenches a loud, sweet tenor voice began to sing "The Lord Is My Shepherd," and the sound floated up into the clear, moonlit air.

Then he said something surprising: from the German trenches, a rich baritone voice tuned in, singing "Der Herr Ist Mein Heiter auf Deutsche." For a few moments, everybody in both trenches concentrated on the sound of these two invisible singers and the beautiful music and the harmony. The British soldier and the German soldier sang praise to the Lord who was their shepherd. The singing stopped, and the sound slowly died away.

"We huddled in the bottom of our trenches and tried to keep warm until Christmas Day dawned," he said. "Early on Christmas morning, some of the British soldiers climbed out of their trenches into the no man's land, carrying a football."

One soldier carried a round football (a real football where the foot is applied to the ball!). (You need to understand that whenever the British go anywhere, they always take two things with them: their teapots and their footballs.) These English soldiers started kicking around a football, in a pickup game in no man's land, between the trenches.

Then the old man said, "Some of the German soldiers climbed out, and England played Germany at football in no man's land on Christmas Day in the middle of the battlefield in France in the first World War." (England won.)

Then he said, "The next morning, the carnage began again, with machine guns and bayonet fighting. Everything was back to normal."