I have an occasionally recurring dream in which I have to get to class for a big test, but I'm totally unprepared. I can't even remember where the test is being held. I dash from place to place, all the while looking at my watch and realizing I will be a hopeless failure if I don't get wherever it is I need to go soon.
I'm smart enough to realize that this, like most dreams, is a metaphor. I'm not a student anymore. But I do fear failure. I fear disappointing people who depend on me. I fear not finishing whatever it is that seems so important at the moment.
And, like a lot of people, I seem to fear those things a lot during the Christmas season.
That's why it's worth stopping for a moment and pondering the passing of Alfred Anderson, who died at a nursing home last week at the age of 109. As a number of newspaper accounts mentioned, both here and in his native Britain, he was the last surviving witness to the legendary Christmas Day truce along the Western Front of World War I in 1914.
You remember the story. British, French and Belgian troops were dug into trenches along one side. Their German enemies were dug in along the other. Every day they tried hard to blast each other into oblivion. In the trenches, corpses mounted, soldiers huddled in mud and freezing water and few dared venture out to the no-man's land that separated the trenches.
But on Christmas Day, some of the German soldiers began singing familiar Christmas songs and lighting makeshift trees. The other side was skeptical at first, but soon the spirit of the moment took hold. Soldiers from both sides emerged from their hiding places. Enemies exchanged cigarettes, drinks and other token gifts. By some accounts, a Scottish soldier produced an actual soccer ball and a game was started.
Generations of historians have since wondered what might have happened if this informal truce had spread even farther and flourished. If the reluctant people governments send to wage war decide instead to make friends with their equally reluctant enemies, how would history change? What would happen to the power of those directing the war?
We'll never know, of course. The commanders of those celebratory troops, no doubt worried about their own heads, threatened courts martial if soldiers didn't return and commence firing. And so the killing continued.
Alfred Anderson wasn't actually one of the ones who shook hands and exchanged gifts with the enemy. According to an account last week in The Scotsman, his platoon was back a bit from the front lines that day. The newspaper quoted him as having said, "There was not a sound to be heard for a while — nothing. And then we heard some cheering. This had been the two sides fraternizing, I think. Some of the boys came back from the front line and told us in the billets what was happening.
"Then it became the usual thing. The silence ended early in the afternoon and the killing started again."
By all accounts, Anderson lived a good life after returning from the horror of those trenches. He survived a battle injury, married, raised a family, had grandchildren, great-grandchildren and even great-great-grandchildren. He was active in his community, and he served his country well. He even received a high military honor from the French in 1998 for his World War I service, and he always spoke reverently of the friends he lost in those trenches.
But the one thing the world focused on at his death was something he had only come within several yards of nearly 91 years ago.
Perhaps that is because the Christmas truce represents, for some, the last gasp of civility in an otherwise relentless tide of bloody conflicts since then. Such an informal truce would be hard to imagine in today's conflicts.
Or perhaps it is because we are taken by those rare instances where people set aside the things the world tells them are important and decide to serve a greater good. The true spirit of Christmas has a unique way of moving and softening hearts.
That's worth remembering as we head into another Christmas season. Anderson may have been the last earthly link to that day, but he doesn't have to be the last link to the spirit of that day.
While few among us, with the exception of those serving in the Middle East, have to endure the horrors of warfare, we have other ways of digging trenches and fortifying ourselves against the things that really matter. Like that dream I have now and then, we get so frantic about making deadlines and being prepared to face responsibilities that we forget about the world beyond ourselves.
In Anderson's honor, this season may be a good time to venture out into no-man's land and look around.
Jay Evensen is editor of the Deseret Morning News editorial page. E-mail: even@desnews.com.