"CHRISTMAS NOT JUST ONCE A YEAR" - A Short Story by Heinrich Böll - 1952 (Nicht nur zur Weihnachtszeit" )

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CHRISTMAS NOT JUST ONCE A YEAR" - A Short Story by Heinrich Böll - 1952 (Nicht nur zur Weihnachtszeit") - 7 Pages - included in the anthology A Very German Christmas-

Heinrich Böll 

Born: December 21, 1917, Cologne, Germany

Died: July 16, 1985 (age 67 years), Kreuzau, Germany

1972 - Wins Nobel Prize for Literature 

Christmas Not Just Once a Year" takes place in the years immediately following World War II. Böll himself participated in the war as a Nazi soldier. In the course of the war, he wrote hundreds of letters home to his wife, many of which explicitly criticized Germany's role in the war.

Christmas Not Just Once a Year" ("Nicht nur zur Wiehnachtszeit") was written in 1951 and was first "published" in a German radio broadcast that year. Considered to be one of Heinrich Böll's finest satires, the story was included in German in his 1952 book, Nicht nur zur Weihnachtszeit, a collection that was expanded in 1966 and renamed Nicht nur zur Wiehnachtszeit: Satiren. In the United States, the story appeared most recently in Böll's collected stories, The Stories of Heinrich Böll, published by Knopf in 1986. In addition, "Christmas Not Just Once a Year" is one of Böll's most widely anthologized stories.

"Christmas Not Just Once a Year" tells the simple story of Aunt Milla's hysterical reaction to the taking down of the family Christmas tree in 1946 and her family's subsequent reaction to her hysteria. Told through the eyes of one of the family's first cousins, the story describes the complete moral and psychological disintegration of a family that refuses to acknowledge Milla's profound psychological problems. Instead of addressing the issue of Milla's breakdown clinically or directly, the family decides to continue with the ruse that every day is Christmas. For two years they go to great lengths and expense to host a nightly ritual of Christmas tree decorations and carol singing in order to keep Aunt Milla from screaming hysterically.

Böll's narrative becomes increasingly absurd as the story develops. Written while Germany was in the early stages of its postwar reconstruction, and during a time when it had yet to fully acknowledge its role in World War II or in the Holocaust. "Christmas Not Just Once a Year" addresses the theme of historical amnesia. Just as the family refuses to accept the fact that things are no longer "like the good old days" of prewar Germany and that Aunt Milla could not become healthy until the family acknowledges this basic fact, Böll believed that Germany would remain stunted if it did not directly address its Nazi past and come to terms with its role in the war.