'Twas the night before Christmas, and in the bar-rack,

An RAF Corporal was blowing his stack…

Well, the scansion limped, the rhyme was forced, and Newkirk was actually keeping a lid on his temper, if with a visible effort, but the sentiment wasn't entirely wrong, Hogan thought, muscling into the center of the discussion. Newkirk, with a tension that was all but palpable, was sitting cross-legged on the bench, mending a jacket that had seen better days, albeit so long ago that they were lost to memory. He was looking only at his needlework, his jaw clenched tight.

"Pierre, do not be such a spoilsport! Pere Noel has brought us a beautiful turkey, and I shall cook a Christmas feast that will bring a smile even to your grim face. Get in the spirit!"

"Leave off, Louie," Newkirk said. "Cook anything you bloody well please. I'll eat in the mess 'all."

"Aw, come on, Newkirk! It's Christmas! We're all supposed to be jolly and everything," Carter said. "I know this isn't the greatest place in the world, but it… it's Christmas! Like the song says, we've got to be merry and bright."

"Who's stopping you? Deck the 'alls to your 'eart's content. Just leave me out of it, or I'll deck you."

"Take it easy, Pete," Kinch reproved. "It's the holidays. Maybe your Christmas present to all of us could be a little less attitude."

"Tell you what. I'll do you one better," he snapped. "My presents will be my absence." He scooped up the jacket, stuffed it under his arm in a wad, and slammed his hand against the bunk. It opened.

Before he could descend into the tunnel, though, Olsen, the current doorwatcher, shouted, "Guard!"

Newkirk slapped the tunnel door closed, and threw himself onto the bunk as it lowered, a split second before the barracks door swung open, letting in a gust of cold air, a German guard, and a Kommandant. It was even money as to which was the least welcome.

"Achtung!" barked the guard, a youngster, who had probably not lied about his age to enlist. He was a new broom; twitchy, quick to reach for his rifle and slow to decide what to do with it once he had it. The men came to attention readily enough; it wasn't worth bothering to do otherwise.

"Welcome to our humble abode, Kommandant," Hogan said easily. "To what do we owe the pleasure?"

"I'm here to inform you that, as a Christmas gift on behalf of our beloved Fuhrer, all prisoners will be allotted an extra hour of electricity tonight, and the mess hall will be serving a special Christmas dinner."

"What, the cabbage will be red, and the bread will be green, is that it? We already live in a ruddy stable."

Klink, who did not appreciate being mocked when he was being, so far as he was concerned, a veritable Fourth Magi, gave Newkirk a hard look. "Anyone who doesn't care to partake in the festivities is more than welcome to spend the holidays in the cooler," he warned.

Hogan cut in again before Newkirk could finish digging his own grave. "Of course not, Kommandant! I lack the words to say how grateful we are for your generosity."

The look on Newkirk's face suggested that he was suffering from no such lack of suitable vocabulary, and, moreover, that the cooler would be a small price to pay for airing it. Hogan pasted on a wider smile. "Will you be joining us for the feast, Kommandant?"

Klink's face screwed up in distaste; one might have suspected that Newkirk's evaluation of Klink's likely menu might not have been all that far off the mark. "Me? Eat that revolti— Colonel Hogan, I don't think that fraternizing with the prisoners would be at all fitting for a German officer." He tucked his riding crop more securely under his arm. "That will be all." With a disdainful snort and an attempt at hauteur that had probably looked a lot more imposing when he'd been practicing it in front of the bathroom mirror, he swept out of the barracks. It would have been nice if he had tripped over the threshold while doing so, but real life is rarely as well timed as that, and a crying shame, too, thought Hogan.

"Sounds positively scrumptious," Kinch said dryly. "O Come, All Ye Famished."

"Good King Wenceslaus looked out; On the feast of Stephen," sang Olsen. "Saw the kriegies 'round about; In the latrines heaving!"

"Well, the extra hour of electricity will be nice," Carter said. "We can have our real Christmas dinner after we finish laughing at whatever Klink serves up."

"What these Boche do to perfectly good food is no laughing matter," LeBeau said. "It is a sin and a crime."

"On the first day of Christmas, the Jerries gave to me; A bad case of dysenter-eeee," offered Mills.

Olsen laughed. "Ooh. Yeah, that's better than mine. Okay. Er, On the second day of Christmas, the Jerries gave to me, Two sniper towers, and a bad case of dysenter-eeee!"

"On the third day of Christmas—"

There was a distinct possibility, Hogan thought, that several of the men were not only full of Christmas spirit, but Christmas spirits. He didn't have the strength to go looking for the proof, but he wished they'd put a cork in it. Rimshot, please.

"Anyway," he said loudly, trying to bring things back to some sort of order. "We've got to be good little prisoners and make at least a token appearance at Klink's little shindig. And nobody mention the turkey, or we'll have Schultz in here trying to cadge a drumstick."

"Huh! We probably will anyway," LeBeau scoffed. "That man can smell food before it is cooked."

"Aw, there are a lot of foods you can smell before they're cooked," Carter objected. "We always knew if my mom was making her famous lamb stew, because the first step was chopping up all these onions, and it made the whole house smell like—"

"Thank you, Carter," said LeBeau dryly. "I would never have thought of that."

"…Six goons a-guarding, FIIIIVVE MON-O-CLES! Four cooler cells, three roll calls, two sniper towers, and a bad case of dysentery! On the seventh day of Christmas—"

Newkirk, who looked to be about half a chorus away from giving the carolers a knuckle sandwich in lieu of a figgy pudding, had returned to his jacket, stabbing the needle violently into the fabric and pulling the thread a great deal tighter than was strictly necessary.

"God bless us, every one," Hogan muttered to himself. "I think we're gonna need it."

*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*.*

Author's note: I've spared you at least some of the terrible Christmas carol parodies that kept occurring to me. This is not to say that, for instance, some of the men might or might not be humming 'O Ticking-Bomb' at some later date. Or, perhaps, 'O Little Town of Hammelberg, We've Blown Your Bridge Sky-High.' The possibilities, for a sufficiently twisted mind, are more or less endless. Most of the carols I referenced are traditional, but Carter is quoting 'White Christmas,' (May your days be merry and bright,) a popular song from 1942. The men are shown as possessing a couple of ordinary transistor radios in addition to Kinch's setup, and I took the liberty of assuming that, on occasion, they listened to lighter fare than war news on the BBC.