Should I Perish in the War on Christmas, Please Ensure That My Spouse Receives This Letter
This is a letter found in the personal effects of an unknown soldier, mortally wounded in the War on Christmas and left behind by her platoon.
My dear one,
I have been assured that the worst of this tinsel-strewn horror is soon to come. The next battle may well be my last, and I cannot bear the thought of this news reaching you by any other hand.
I regret to inform you that my dearest comrade, our beloved son, has fallen to the Little Drummer Boy. He and I were in the car at the time, I in the driver’s seat, he in the back (and how cruel, this — to lose a child in the one place where we always thought him safe). With these aging ears, I could not hear the radio broadcast over the noise of the defogger. Our brave boy could not escape the line of fire before that sickening rum-pum-pum-pum found its mark.
My senior officers tell me that “the LDB,” as he’s known in the field, is a celebrated warrior and an uncanny tracker. Apparently there is some prestige in evading him for as long as we did. Despite this encouragement, though, I find little comfort in it. I’m ashamed of the way I flailed at the radio-knob, in a pathetic attempt to save myself, while our sweet son perished alone.
The chilling, desperate screams of retailers surround us here in the trenches. We can no longer tell them apart from the angels shrieking on every lamp-post. And the truth — the great burden of this endless, festive nightmare — is that those trinket-sellers were once human beings, just as we are. Gentle people, overcome with a desire to give of themselves. Perhaps this is true of “the LDB” as well, and of those smug, gift-toting wise men, mobbed around the mangers so inappropriately mounted on courthouse lawns. And are we not alike? Do we not all writhe in the gears of a terrible machine that will shudder on forever, long after we are lost? The war has made hollow caricatures of us all. I am no hero; I am just another soldier, weary and ill, surviving on stolen chestnuts at my meager campfire.
As I write these lines, more eggnog splatters in the streets, and I grow faint from the stench. I cannot adequately convey the terror in which we are immersed. At any cost, my love, you must keep safe. Promise me you will never lay eyes on these seizure-inducing lights, nor fall prey to the wreaths, those sinister, gaping effigies ribboned on every door. The enemy is literally everywhere, and it is more cunning than we ever dreamed. We are attacked without warning in the very corridors where we seek respite.
Thoughts of you play endlessly in my mind while I am afield. I am haunted by all of the times I could have been more patient, or less bourgeois, or brought you better gifts (but not too many, lest we fall into the commercial squalor we both swore to defeat). For now, I can do little more than place one dirty boot in front of the other and pray to nothing in particular.
I offer you the tattered shreds of my honor. I will fight on in your name, and our son’s name, for as long as I draw breath. Should the shifting boundaries of this war zone encompass you in time, I wish you the joy of one last snowfall, an astonishing blanket of white that covers the distant hills, without a sleigh bell or a bauble in evidence.
I wish you the happiest of holidays.
All my love,
Your faithful wife.
