.London, 1940.

And in despair I bowed my head;

"There is no peace on earth," I said;

"For hate is strong,

And mocks the song

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!"

Sugar rationing had started in January. The sweet shops suffered, because we kids didn't drop in like we used to. Sometimes I thought the ration stamps were being rationed.

I'm not quite sure how we convinced our parents that we would be coming home. We liked the Professor, but his house was drafty and as friendly as he was, we wanted home. We'd spent the Christmas of '39 with him and we were all determined that the next one would be at Home.

Home, it turned out, would never be as easy to define as I once thought. I had been pulled around so much, that I began to wonder if there was such a place as Home. They like to say Home is where the Heart it, but I never felt particularly at home all by myself.

My hands were always colder than anyone else's, but Lucy, whenever she had reason to take my hands, always reminded me that cold hands mean a warm heart. I wondered.

Peter joined up.

The only thing that surprised me, was that my father had signed for him without so much as batting an eyelash. Peter announced his intentions shortly after we arrived in London. My mother protested, but my father quietly drove him to the enlistment office the next day and signed. His hand did not waver. I saw; I was there.

After all, before he became a surgeon, my father was in the Great War. He flew airplanes. That might have been why Peter had been set on joining the RAF. Mother said it was, but I tended to think that Peter missed horses so much he was finding the nearest replacement.

"God bless you," I said when he shook my hand just before he'd left for flight training. His uniform didn't fit. I wondered at how his shoulders had gotten so narrow and had to remind myself that he was still only seventeen.

"And you, old man," he said. Looking at him was like looking through a warped lens. I expected chainmail to clink under a tabard, but it didn't. At least his smile was the same as it always was.

"I wish I was going." I said.

I was disgustingly young.

We played cricket in the backyard; we were known as the neighborhood gang. Me, Tom, Jack and Percy Neville-Latimer III. Percy Neville-Latimer III lived down the street in the mews; the only thing his family had left was the last name.

The three of us took the wheelbarrow out of my dad's toolshed and went door to door collecting scrap metal. If we collected enough, we'd get to go to a free matinee at the picture theatre. We went everywhere, visiting the rich and the poor. There were lines of grand houses along the streets, but in back of them, the attached mews had been converted into smaller, humbler abodes. Those were cramped alleys with mongrel dogs and tired eyed housewives. The Depression was painfully real in those streets, but they still gave. Sewing machines and prized copper kettles. There was a lot of scrap around Chelsea. A constable caught us pulling up the wrought iron fence in front of a house and we had to pay a fine. It wasn't like we could have gotten it anywhere. The three of us were pretty puny.

"Too bad your brother isn't here," Tom said.

I agreed.

I hated boarding school. I hated it so much I turned on my powers of persuasion and convinced my parents that Susan and I would be just as well off at the school down the road. Lucy was still too young to go to school and I didn't want to lose touch with another member of my family. Peter going off was enough.

Dad and I sank an air raid shelter in the back yard. It was one of those Anderson ones with the corrugated steel. It flooded every time it rained.

"I'd rather shelter under the dining room table," Susan said as she helped me bail it out.

"The good news is that the Germans won't bomb during a rainstorm," I said comfortingly.

"Well, if they do we'll need umbrellas."

Susan was a wizard with the rationing. We'd gotten used to making do with quite a lot less butter and sugar, and she had an uncanny instinct for flavors. She'd also gotten hold of one of those nifty little books that the Bureau of Food was spreading around. Our mother figured that Susan had met someone at the professor's house that could cook; we didn't undeceive her.

The phony war had been rushing along in fine form. Chamberlain had lost premiership over the debacle in Norway and Winston Churchill had taken his place. He'd barely had time to move into the Cabinet War Rooms before things began to fall apart.

It started May 10. The Germans pushed through Belgium and smashed the French frontier. Belgium wavered and fell, France's ninety divisions fled. We were stunned; those ninety French divisions constituted the largest and most modern army in the world and it had been shattered in a matter of weeks. The British Expeditionary Force only had ten divisions under its belt. Lord Gort, the British commander retreated under great pressure. That was how more than a quarter of a million men found themselves sitting among the sand dunes on the beaches around Dunkirk.

There was desperation on all sides. We expected invasion. Susan was stockpiling kitchen knives; her face was grim. Over the wireless it was announced that any boat that could float was to be taken around to Ramsgate and turned over to Navy ratings. Lucy and I wanted to go and help, but I remembered in time that I was only thirteen and she was eight.

What happened next was one of the most curious episodes of the war. For nearly a week, the Channel remained calm and that fleet of little boats ferried our men from the beach to the Destroyers prowling around off-shore. The men that were showing up in London were tired, but triumphant. My heart swelled with pride. They were soldiers that anyone would be honored to lead into battle.

The bombing started shortly after that.

Airfields were getting it all over England. We didn't know it at the time, but Kingston upon Hull was being smashed to bits. It was right around then that Peter's flight training was declared over and he was rushed into a squadron.

He was posted to Gravesend, so he was close enough to come to us whenever he was on leave. I was slightly surprised to see him every time he showed up. Though we hardly ever saw it from London, the fighting was terrible over the airfields and industrial cities around England. New pilots were fortunate if they lasted a week. Peter made it clear that he was holding on by his fingernails.

I did as I always did whenever he went into battle. I carried him around with me on my shoulders; I thought he was going to die. I was trying to say good bye to him in my mind.

"See you later," he always said before he left for his base.

"I'll hold you to it," I replied.

Lucy was a tower of strength. She always was. It often seemed that nothing could douse the light she carried around with her. She lit up rooms when she walked into them.

"She is an old little girl," my father would say. It really was the only way to describe her.

"It must be the war," my mother would reply with a troubled face.

The first bombs fell on London on September 7. I can honestly say that those first few months of the Blitz were the very worst experience of my lengthy life. Nothing like it had ever happened to me before. Concussion did strange things to everything. The house across the street from us disappeared one night, our windows were blown out and someone's ladder was stuck in our tree. Whenever we walked in the streets, we always had our ears tuned for the sound of the air raid siren.

We were thankful of our submarine shelter as wave after wave of emotionless gray machines growled overhead and dropped their burdens on our defenseless heads. The ack ack at Hyde Park roared through the night; we could hear the howl of fighter engines and the grate of the bombers. I wondered where Peter was.

My father sat with a white face on the lower bunk of one of the beds; the noise, the sloshing water around our ankles, the corrugated steel made him think of his time in the trenches during the Great War before he'd been snapped up by the Royal Flying Corps. Lucy felt his pain and with an expression half like a child's, half like a woman's, she'd make him read to her.

On the very worst nights, as my sister and mother knitted socks for our soldiers, my father's voice rose and fell so like Peter's as we heard the Tale of Peter Rabbit and the Tailor of Gloucester.

"Talking animals are always so wise," Lucy would say, almost asleep. My father would look down at her with a strange, beseeching look on his face and I wondered. I always wondered about him. We'd been told we'd see it in the eyes and I always thought I could see it in his.

Christmas came almost before we saw it coming. It seemed strange…anticlimactic. My heart of hearts wanted glorious halls lit with candles, midnight dances, and fantastical gifts. I had always loved Christmas. There were games of charades and hide-and-seek. Foreign royalty came from far and wide to attend our Christmases.

Susan grew quieter and quieter. She'd knitted us each a pair of socks. We got a thin, wispy tree that was only two feet tall and Lucy decorated it with the aluminum chaff released by the German bombers that always littered our lawn every morning. We didn't find out until after the war that it was to fool the RADAR.

Susan was in the kitchen, attempting to bake a Christmas cake when she snapped. I was in there with her, reading the paper and wishing for a cup of tea. They rationed that, too.

She dropped her spoon on the floor and, as she bent down to get it, swept the nearly full jar of sugar after it, where it smashed into a thousand fragments. She stared at it, misery on her face, then burst into tears.

I didn't say anything. There wasn't anything to say. Our sugar ration was on the floor and intermixed with glass shards it was a total loss. I took Susan by the arm and sat her down in a chair, then found the broom and swept it all up.

I made her a cup of tea. I felt that this was an emergency.

"Feel better?" I asked, as she sipped it slowly.

She nodded, but by her tear-stained face, I knew it wasn't true.

"I'm so sorry," she whispered.

"Forget the sugar for a moment," I said. "Tell me what's really wrong."

She was silent and I knelt down and took her cold hand. For once, it was colder than mine.

"Cold hands, warm heart," I said.

She gave me a little smile.

"Tell me," I said.

"Oh Edmund!" she burst out. "I'm trying…I really am, but I don't want it to be Christmas…it's so cold, so lonely, so empty. I want to go home…I want to go home."

"Susan," I said firmly. "This is our home. This cold, misty, foggy Britain with her strange and whimsical people is our home. All those things you used to love so well can be found here. England makes a different kind of magic, but it's no less wonderful."

She shook her head, "This will never be my home."

"I know what you're thinking," I said. "You want to go back. You miss the beauty, you miss the magic, you miss the pageantry.

"Those are memories, Susan," I continued, "those are shadows of things that have been and never will be again. But it's not too late to take back the past. We must bring back the things that made it great and we may find that the past is not so very far away after all."

"What made it great?" Susan asked, pulling out her handkerchief to blow her nose. I took this as a good sign.

"What made it great is here," I said and I tapped her heart. "There's magic here, Susan. Christmas isn't a day, Home isn't a place. There's more to it than that. The gifts, the songs and the lights aren't what makes Christmas. A house isn't what makes a home; it's love."

"But if we went back…" Susan trailed off.

"If we went back, you would already find that it wasn't your home. There is a greater, more wonderful place lying in store for us. No matter where we go while we are still alive, we will be sojourners in a strange land. We've been offered a gift, Susan; sometimes it will hurt terribly, but in the end we will have joy."

Susan nodded, but I wasn't quite certain if my words had really sunk in.

Christmas dinner was thin, but splendid. Peter had arrived on Christmas Eve and as we all sat around the drawing room with our parents, watching as Lucy lit the candles on our spindly Christmas tree, I felt Home.

I mulled all that evening about us. The question I asked over and over again was 'why', but there never was a subject, it was just a vague inquiry. Perhaps we learned to be extraordinary so we could learn to be ordinary. I thought being ordinary was the most difficult of all.

We had greater battles to wage than we had ever had before. At one time, one word I spoke could shake the foundations of nations, now I was learning to be humble. Someone else was king, I was learning to be his subject. It seemed a cold shock to be thrust from that place into this, but I never doubted that there was a reason.

Gifts were unwrapped slowly, dwelled upon and exclaimed over. They were handmade, but they had been labored over in the wee hours when no one else was awake. They were more precious than a thousand golden ornaments, more beautiful than rubies. It seemed to my half-asleep eyes that our tree grew until it was a giant, our simple, mended clothes were royal robes.

We were royalty of a kingdom we had never seen and as simple, lowly people, we were more important than kings.

And in his quiet, unassuming way, my father gave each of us something that would change that Christmas again. As I unwrapped mine, I saw that it was a tiny wooden figurine of a lion, a noble, wonderful Lion. As I looked up and met his eyes, the question I had asked all that year was finally answered with a nod

~o*o~

There was something special about that Christmas. We were all bound and determined to make it the best we'd ever had and in the end, it was, but not because we tried. There was magic in our Home that day. It wasn't incantations or waving wands, it wasn't darkness or strange motions. It was something stronger and warmer, something so real we could almost touch It. We didn't need a star to find it; we were learning to be shepherds instead of kings. It was a gleam of light on a dark night, as if we, weary travelers had been toiling up a long hill all that spring and just now were looking down into moonlit valley where a stone church stood with one lighted, welcoming window and a bell tolling across the darkness. That was what that Christmas was like and I had never seen another like it.

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:

"God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;

The Wrong shall fail,

The Right prevail,

With peace on earth, good-will to men."

Authors' Note: Merry Christmas to All from Rose and Psyche!