• U.S.

PLAIN PEOPLE: All on Earth Together

5 minute read
TIME

In Saxony, in Germany’s Russian zone, the Communist government banned all Christmas carols that mentioned angels or the Christ Child. At a fair in Berlin’s Soviet sector, swings, merry-go-rounds and roller coasters whirled in a raucous counterfeit of yuletide gaiety, but there was little or nothing for shoppers to buy. At grey-market shops, a pound of chocolates cost a laborer’s full week’s wage. Berliners stared at the meager, overpriced goods in frustrated despair; women wept. “Dear God,” muttered one Hausfrau who had been searching in vain for some coffee cups and plates to brighten her yuletide table, “another Communist Christmas.”

One of the few bright, spots in Berlin was the busy office of the Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe. Last week some 10,000 parcels of food, clothing and other goods from the U.S. poured into CARE’s office in the city’s Western sector. A white-haired, undernourished piano teacher wept openly as a CARE parcel containing a Christmas turkey was handed to her. “Someone I don’t even know,” she cried, “a Dr. Cohn of New York, sent this.”

The fifth postwar Christmas found the free world steadily recovering, but it was a recovery that still depended on the U.S. Santa Claus. More perhaps than the larger bounties of Marshall Plan aid, and of loans negotiated by diplomats and bankers, it was the gift parcel from America which had become a sign of the world’s continuing need, and a symbol of American generosity.

Across the Land. By this year, CARE—which had started at war’s end with a supply of two million 10-in-1 army rations—had sent 9,000,000 relief packages to Europe and Asia. This Christmas season, CARE offered 18 varieties of packages, ranging from the $13.50 holiday parcel (including one canned Sell’s turkey, 8 oz. Swanson butter, 1 lb. Crosse & Blackwell plum pudding, 1 lb. Welch’s orange marmalade, 1 lb. Sun-Maid raisins, 1 lb. Uncle Ben’s rice, 1 lb. Co-op coffee and 1 can-opener) to the $10 layette packages (including 1 doz. diapers, 1 crib blanket, 1 receiving blanket, 2 kimonos, 2 nursing bottles, 4 nipples, 1 pkg. safety pins, etc.).

Hundreds of other profit and non-profit organizations—churches, welfare organizations, stores—were shipping gifts abroad.

Across the broad, rich land, people also wrapped and sealed their own packages for relatives in the Old Country, or for old acquaintances from old vacation trips, or for strangers whose names they had got by chance. A portly gentleman on Boston’s Beacon Hill sent off a consignment of Havana cigars to Britain. In Chicago Mrs. Herman Pierce was preparing a Christmas parcel for the daughter of her late father’s niece in Germany. Mrs. Pierce and her factory-worker husband were not well off. But “we can do without a little,” she explained, “to help them a lot. We’re all here on earth together.”

“It Teaches Lesson.” The gift parcels from people like the Pierces, which for weeks had been streaming overseas from U.S. ports (the New York post office sent out 1,790,389 packages between Nov. 1 and Dec. 15), formed a network which tied America to every corner of the world where Christmas was cherished. Some 30,000 of them went to Japan, which had the brightest holidays since the war, with gay, Oriental Santa Clauses smiling in front of well-stocked department stores. But many a Japanese mother pulled her child away from the images of Santa “Kurosu” and from the store counters because she could not afford to pay the high prices for the fine new wares. “Receiving gift from complete stranger,” muttered a Japanese artist last week, “teaches biggest lesson of unselfishness.”

The brown, heavily stamped parcels also went behind the Iron Curtain, to Czechoslovakia and Poland, where the Communist authorities officially declared that such gifts from America were unnecessary, and had so intimidated their recipients that many sent the parcels back unopened. Some 66,000 of the parcels went to Austria, where Christmas 1949 would still be harsh and bitter, and about 90,000 went to France, where at least outwardly Noel was as bright as ever. Some 685,000 found their way to the austerity-ridden country of Dickens and plum pudding, which celebrated heartily this year—even if it still did not eat very heartily. Everywhere people who once would have been too proud to take them last week accepted the gifts from the table of American abundance.

The U.S. was not loved—and would never be loved—for being the world’s richest land; but it did earn genuine gratitude. Under overall sponsorship of the Church World Service, Inc., children of 19 countries have labored to draw and paint Christmas cards thanking the U.S. for its gifts. Norse youngsters pictured their Little Dwarf with the red hat, who brings them the season’s gifts; from Germany came a nightmare scene of a ship called Bremen at the bottom of the ocean, from Italy a picture showing two children amid Rome’s ruins.

Their elders found a spokesman in George Jones, a London dockworker, who said: “Y’know, I’d like to meet some of these Americans some day after this. I’d like to buy ’em a pint, I would.”

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