Got Mittens – Rainbow Advent Calendar

If you haven’t been following the Rainbow Advent calendar, I’d recommend you to do so. You’re bound to find something that’s right up your reading street. And a big shout out to Alex Jane, whose idea this was – her masterlist has links to all the stories so far. The charity I’m supporting is the Albert Kennedy Trust. The thought of young people being chucked out of their homes because of their sexuality breaks my heart. (Cochrane Towers has always been a place where the girls’ friends could be ‘out’ before they could be ‘out’ at home.)

My offering is inspired by the stories of the 1914 Christmas truce. Despite some folk in recent years saying it never happened (what is it with people trying to alter history?) we have sufficient eyewitness accounts to know that peace broke out in pockets that year.

I’m not specifically promoting any of my books alongside this, but you can find them all by poking around my website. Although if you sign up for my newsletter (there’s a link on every page of my site) by the end of December you’ll get another free Advent themed story. If you’re already signed up, you’ll be getting it, too.

In years to come they’ll swear it never happened. It couldn’t have happened.
“You’re joking,” some smart Alec will say. “You’re never telling me that you and Fritz laid down yer guns and set to with a football like it was a Saturday afternoon kickabout?”
Maybe I’ll clip that smart Alec round the ear. Or maybe I’ll just say to him, “You don’t know. You weren’t there.”
I was there. I know.
I remember when the spirit of Christmas came down and knocked some sense into us. How we had a real bit of loving our enemies and doing good to those who despise us. And if it was only for a few hours, so what? Better to do that on Christmas day than knock seven types of shit out of each other. We had a laugh, too—Fritz put up a sign saying, “Gott mit uns” and one of our boys put up a sign that said, “We got mittens too.”

Read more… Got Mittens