Prince of Peace

December 21, 2025

Dr. Paul Cannings

On December 25, 1994, the Associated Press—dateline London—reported an amazing story
that took place during World War I. One hundred and ten years earlier, on the first Christmas
Day, British and German troops put down their guns and celebrated peacefully together in the
no-man’s-land between the trenches. For a brief moment, the war came to a halt.
In some places, festivities began when German troops lit candles on small Christmas trees along
their parapets so the British sentries a few hundred yards away could see them. Elsewhere, the
British acted first, starting bonfires and setting off rockets. Pvt. Oswald Tilley of the London Rifle
Brigade wrote to his parents, “Just you think that while you were eating your turkey, etc., I was
out talking and shaking hands with the very men I had been trying to kill a few hours before!! It
was astounding.”
Both armies had received many comforts from home and felt unusually generous and well-
disposed toward their enemies during that first winter of the war—before the brutal battles of
attrition that began in 1915 and would eventually claim 10 million lives.
All along the line that Christmas Day, soldiers discovered that their enemies were much like
themselves. Many began to question why they were trying to kill one another. The generals
were shocked. High Command diaries describe their fear that if such camaraderie spread, it
could undermine the troops’ will to fight. Yet the soldiers in khaki and gray sang carols to each
other, exchanged gifts of tobacco, jam, sausage, chocolate, and liquor, traded names and
addresses, and even played soccer between the shell holes and the barbed wire. They even
paid mutual trench visits. British television producer Malcolm Brown and researcher Shirley
Seaton, in their 1984 book Christmas Truce, call this moment “the most famous truce in military
history.”
It is remarkable that the spirit of celebrating Jesus’ birth created such peace. Imagine how
many lives might have been spared—10 million—if the spirit of that celebration had never
ended.
“For a child will be born to us, a son will be given to us;
And the government will rest on His shoulders;
And His name will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Eternal Father, Prince of Peace.
There will be no end to the increase of His government or of peace…”
—Isaiah 9:6–7
Christ would later say to His disciples:
“Peace I leave with you; My peace I give to you;
Not as the world gives do I give to you.
Do not let your heart be troubled, nor let it be fearful.”

—John 14:26-28
Left to himself, man creates divisiveness, hatred, death, and destruction. Only Christ is our
peace. Our only hope for peace—whether in our homes, our schools, our communities, or the
world—is Christ, and Christ alone.