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Launching into his eleventh annual Christmas mission to the nation's cold war outposts, New York's Francis Cardinal Spellman, 72, regaled the troops with an account of his own frustrated military career. Back in 1918, His Eminence, then working on the archdiocesan newspaper in Boston, exuberantly bought naval chaplain's regalia only to be rejected by the Navy because he was too short. Back to the store went a determined Father Spellman to be fitted out in doughboy drab—whereupon he was foiled again by an archiepiscopal order freezing him in his Boston job. "I still visit the troops each Christmas," concluded the longtime military vicar to Roman Catholics in the U.S. armed forces, "because of my 1918 inferiority complex."
Yowling dissonantly in the arms of his Aunt Elizabeth as the Archbishop of Canterbury sprinkled him with water from the River Jordan, Britain's 46-day-old Viscount Linley was christened David Albert Charles in the domed music room of Buckingham Palace. The ceremony over, David's proud parents, Princess Margaret and the Earl of Snowdon, set off to finish up their preparations for a Christmas en famille at the Queen's Norfolk country home, after which they planned to take a second honeymoon in the West Indies—sans the squalling viscount.
Buttonholed by a CBS-TV interviewer for his views on President Kennedy's campaign for wide tariff-cutting powers to keep the U.S. in step with Europe's burgeoning Common Market, Kansas' spunky Alf M. London, 74, expressed emphatic support for the Kennedy proposals. Did he feel strongly enough to quit the Republican party if it fought freer trade? Well, blurted the 1936 G.O.P. standard-bearer who was buried by F.D.R. in the biggest political avalanche in U.S. history: "With the state of the world today, I'd be very much tempted."
"I was burning myself out," confessed Jordan's hard-living King Hussein, 26. as he ended a fortnight's physical checkup in London. "The doctors have advised me to take three days rest each week and a month off every six months. I'm not to do any more aerobatics, and I must fly only in pressurized planes.'' Happily, after eight beleaguered years on the precarious Hashemite throne, the doughty descendant of Mohammed felt he could afford an occasional rehabilitating breather. "Things are now going well at home,'' reported Hussein. "We are over the battle for survival.''
Home again from a goodwill tour of the Far East that had won her a host of new friends (TIME, Dec. 15), Britain's coltish Princess Alexandra, 25, mourned the loss of an old one—the beloved teddy bear that she had mislaid sometime during a cruise down Burma's Irrawaddy River. This week, both the Burmese Army and the R.A.F. having confessed failure in massive teddy bear hunts, someone in the royal family was bound to be shopping for a Christmas replacement for the furry creature that had been Alexandra's pillow pal since childhood.