Here is a podcast that you might enjoy.

BBC documentary on the "The Christmas Truce" of World War One, with many first hand accounts of that day.

All ads work by commodifying emotion. The product and brand are identified with the emotions produced by the ad content. At least that's the intention.

I'd like to hear what he thinks of the appallingly tasteless Sainsbury's ad that managed to commodify the emotional response to the Christmas truces in WW1.


“What is our ideology? Is it the worship of Christ or the worship of products?” - False dichotomy, Mr Brand.

Cheers!
http://www.videosift.com/video/Christmas-truce-of-December-1914
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0424205/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_truce

There's a beautiful one here: http://www.videosift.com/video/Christmas-truce-of-December-1914

A friend's grandfather, who was in the trenches on Christmas, once related his own experience during the Christmas Truce to me and my friends during a holiday break. It moved us to tears, and was something that I will never forget. To put aside all the worries and troubles of our much-to-serious lives and just remember for a few moments that we are all humans living in the same world, and to celebrate that simple fact....perhaps I'm just a romantic, but I believe THAT is as close to the spirit of Christmas as people can get.

You know, "based on true events" doesn't exactly mean "this really and absolutely happened without a shadow of a doubt". This IS based on true events to the extent that for a brief moment on Christmas in 1914, both Germans and the British laid down arms and shared a mutual respite in hostilities. THAT is well represented in this film and I think whoever created it did an excellent job in conveying that, even if it was through a situation that may or may not have happened.

Of course, since it is your word against history and those recounted by the men that were actually there (http://www.snopes.com/holidays/christmas/truce.asp, http://www.firstworldwar.com/features/christmastruce.htm, http://www.lib.byu.edu/~english/WWI/historical/ChristmasTruce.html, http://expage.com/truce1, etc.), such a situation obviously couldn't have happened. Moreover, if you had bothered to read the above link, you would have seen that such an instance was apocryphal, and that men from both sides did indeed congregate to bury their dead and sing songs in addition to exchanging gifts.