Meet Stanley Weintraub: Hockessin author explores Christmas during war

What do Christmastime and war have in common?

More than meets the eye, according to Hockessin author Stanley Weintraub, and he’s not talking about fierce battles between SUVs over mall parking spaces.

Weintraub’s newest book, “General Sherman’s Christmas,” chronicles Civil War Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s 300-mile march from Atlanta to Savannah, Ga., a city he captured for Union forces on Dec. 22, 1864. The general, dubbed the Santa Claus of the Union Army, sent a telegram to President Lincoln announcing his gift of the city, just in time for Christmas.

It’s Weintraub’s fourth volume about war and Christmas, but the author of more than 40 books said he has never set out to write about Christmas during wartime. Each of his Christmas books sprung from another he was working on.

The idea for “General Sherman’s Christmas” was born at a book signing in Wilmington, Weintraub said, when a fan mentioned the fabled Christmas Eve telegram Lincoln received from Gen. Sherman. Weintraub was working on a book about Lincoln’s wartime election, so he looked the telegram story up, found out it was true and said his interest in the subject was piqued.

“What I try to do in my books on war is to put a human face on it and there’s hardly a better time to put a human face on war than at Christmas,” he said.

Weintraub traces his interest in war back to his childhood when he collected war cards, he said, which were baseball-card-like depictions of small wars in the 1930s, like the Spanish Civil War.

World War II broke out when Weintraub was 10 years old and he was ambitious enough to try and write a history of the conflict, he said, which was his first attempt at writing about war.

Though he gave the project up after a few weeks, he tried his hand at writing again a few years later by keeping a diary while he was serving as an Army Second Lieutenant during the Korean War.

After spending two Christmases overseas, Weintraub understood firsthand how soldiers tend to view the holiday.

“Everyday was the same as the next, so there wasn’t much Christmas,” he said. “All you knew is that the people back home were having their turkey and celebrating and you had your rations, which often came out of cans.”

That’s why events like the Christmas truce of 1914, where fighting in the trenches of World War I stopped between Christmas Eve and New Year’s, are so unique, he said. The Christmas Truce was the subject of Weintraub’s first Christmas war story, “Silent Night: The Remarkable Christmas Truce of 1914.”

Curiosity drives him to write books, said Weintraub, who retired in 2000 from Penn State University where he was a professor, and there’s a certain satisfaction that comes from crafting a perfect sentence.

Being able to work on books in his basement office – a room filled with library shelves of his own works, other favorite volumes and research materials – is what gets him up in the morning, he said.

After spending a lifetime immersed in literature, it’s fitting that even Weintraub’s holiday decorations have a literary theme. He has a small Christmas tree is his living room decorated with miniature versions of his books, each made out of a matchbook by his children or grandchildren.