My first memories of Christmas when  I was three years old and much is mixed with snow, church bells, Silent Night and tinged with the magical mystery of early childhood.

But the circumstances were unusual. My father was a Canadian Trade Commissioner working in Oslo Norway when Germany invaded in April 1940.  I along with my older sister, mother & father were interned in an enemy country, Nazi Germany for two long years, when thanks to a prisoner/diplomatic exchange between Canada and Germany was completed by both governments, and we were able to return to Canada in the Summer of 1942.

My Christmas memory of that first year 1940 is not precise,  but it has this glowing mystical quality that seems proper to infants.  We were permitted to attend Mass in the small Catholic church nearby  with strains of Stille Nacht, Heilege Nacht as we walked over the snow with our Gestapo guards to the  church.