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De luxe London hotels offered Christmas goose and turkey dinners, and a quartet of carol singers in Dickens costumes were hired to wander from one smart London restaurant to another, taking up charity collections for the blind. As usual, London theatres staged the "Christmas Pantomimes" they have revived over & over for generations. In that hoary favorite Aladdin And His Wonderful Lamp last week a few blitz jokes were gently inserted — such as changing the line "Clear the way, clear the way!" into "All clear, all clear!" This year, more than ever, adult Britons went with their moppets to these children's entertainments, seemed to evoke Christmas memories of better, bygone times.
The British Royal Family, who always observe Christmas with great simplicity — the royal Princesses have never had a Christmas tree and did not have one last week—rusticated quietly at a place kept rigidly secret lest Nazi airmen bomb George VI while the King was reading his scheduled Christmas broadcast. This year British Broadcasting Corp. titled its annual program Christmas Under Fire, scheduled Welsh workers singing in a factory, an Army choir in the Holy Land and a broadcast from an R. A. F. patrol plane over the Channel—especially topical because many Britons last week were saying "It would be just like that bloody Hitler to try his invasion on Christmas."* From amid the rubble and ruin of Coventry a broadcast was planned of Holy Communion in the 600-year-old crypt of the chapel of smashed Coventry Cathedral.
* Turkey was 57¢per pound in Britain, goose 40¢.
* The Führer's personal Christmas card last week proved to be a fancy job featuring a photograph of the famed Winged Victory of Samothrace, which German troops took from the Louvre in Paris. It now stands in the Berlin office of Adolf Hitler and on the Dictator's greeting card is shown with a flight of German bombers and fighter aircraft. Instead of ''Merry Christmas" the card reads "Our Winged Victory," Recipients: Il Duce, El Caudillo, Rumania's Antonescu, etc.