C-54 Santa: Christmas from Heaven by Tom Brokaw and David T. Warner

On Christmas Eve, 1948, somewhere between Weisbaden and Berlin, Germany, a twenty-seven-year-old pilot gazed into the night sky. The heavens were filled with stars.

His C-54 cargo plane was packed with 20,000 pounds of flour. "This is the true spirit of Christmas," he thought as he guided his plane toward Templehoff Air Base in West Berlin.

Three years after the end of World War II, in 1948, the Iron Curtain came down with a clang heard around the world. At the end of World War II, all of Hitler's Germany had been divided into the Allied zone in West Germany and the Soviet Union zones in East Germany. The capital, Berlin, had been cut into Soviet and Allied sectors, but Stalin, in an attempt to control all of the city, cut off all ground transportation to the Allied zone in an attempt to starve West Berlin into agreeing to be taken over by the Soviet Union. The U.S. and its English allies were determined to help the city hold out, and together began what was called the Berlin Air Lift, transporting food and medicine into West Berlin to help them survive.

Life in post-war Berlin was very hard. The city was still struggling with the aftermath of their terrible war, and people were hungry and fearful that they would be swallowed up by the Soviets, who had already taken over the eastern half of Germany, Poland, Hungary, and other formerly independent countries and made them part of the Soviet Union. West Berlin's fate lay in the dangerous plan to supply them long enough to force Stalin to abandon his takeover.

When Hal Halverson landed his big C-54 transport plan with the USAF insignia, he noticed that children were gathered around the fence surrounding the Templehoff runway. They were thin and hungry and shivering in the December cold.

These children had little to eat, but they were grateful for the airlift and asked for nothing. Their gratitude melted Hal's heart.

Hal thought of the children back home, hanging their stockings that night, sure that they would find candy and homemade goodies on Christmas the next morning. He remembered his own bountiful Christmases, and suddenly he had an idea.

"I could drop candy from the air!" he thought. "I'll wiggle my wings," he said, spreading his long arms and waving them up and down. "But promise you'll share."

The kids nodded.

At first Hal rounded up donations from the other pilots' and crews' rations for his first candy drop. The crewman made little parachutes from handkerchiefs and twine, and the kids kept coming to the airport to wait for the daily candy drop. The story snowballed, and companies back home in America started sending shipments of candy to Hal's base, tons of it, and Hal Halverston became famous as "the Candy Bomber" or "Uncle Wiggly Wings," as the children of Berlin called him, all looking up and hoping to see the little parachutes whenever they heard the roar of the C-54s overhead. Only three years before, Germany and the U.S. had been deadly enemies. But the kindness of the Candy Bomber and the courage of the other pilots who kept the Allied sector alive for almost a year changed everything, and Germany became one of America's strongest allies.

Tom Brokaw's and David T. Warner's Christmas from Heaven: The True Story of the Berlin Candy Bomber (Shadow Mountain, 2013) provides middle readers with a lesson in history and a Christmas story unlike any other, in which one Air Force pilot's empathy mounted a national response. Included in the book is a DVD which documents this event which symbolically brought a close to World War II and historically enabled West Berlin to become the beacon of freedom that it was in the Cold War period. There is even a guide so that kids can make their own candy parachute.  This is a bit of American history that middle school and high school history classes often give scant coverage, but is well worth knowing.

PBS has their own hour-long production of this story, scheduled in my area on Monday, December 8. Check your local television schedule, as times may vary.

From the Heart: A Season of Gifts by Richard Peck

You could see from here the house was haunted. It hadn't had a lick of paint since VJ Day, maybe the war before that. Only the snowball bushes crowding its foundations seemed to hold the place up.

At night lights moved from room to room. Every evening just at dusk a light bobbed down the walk to the cobhouse and the privy behind and back again.

My little sister Ruth Ann couldn't take her eyes off the place.

"It's like Halloween here in August. I betcha there are spooks inside that house."

And for twelve-year-old Bob that privy becomes his own private house of horrors. Scooped up by the village bullies, led by the massive Roscoe Burdick, they "initiate" him to life in Piatt County, Illinois, by trussing him up and playing water polo with him in the funky brown waters of the local pond and then hanging him, upside down and naked, in a web of fishing line inside that privy, to be eventually found and rescued by the equally frightening Mrs. Dowdel, the nearly ninety-year-old resident of the "haunted house." Mrs. Dowdell wastes no time sizing the situation up:

"I thought I'd seen everything!" she remarked. I made a small sound.

She dumped her corncobs and the Farm Journal and ripped the duct tape off my mouth.

"Yeoww!" I hollered.

"Had to be done," she said. "Who did you say you was?"

I coughed up something--maybe a tadpole. "I'm Bob Barnhart. The boy next door."

"Well, I can see you ain't the girl," said Mrs. Dowdel.

Bob is not the only one in the family for whom prospects look dim in their new home. "I take back every bad thing I ever thought about Terre Haute," Bob's mom laments as she sizes up the situation, and his dad, serving his first pastorate in the dilapidated and almost memberless Methodist Church, spends his first days ministering to the dirty and windowless sanctuary, killing a hog snake and no end of spiders in the choir loft and tacking up plastic over the broken windows. Bob's fifteen-year-old sister Phyllis takes refuge in the daily letters she writes to Elvis and sums up the secret feelings of the family. "I hate this podunk town!"

A most unlikely Christmas angel, Mrs. Dowdel, irascible and short-tempered, proudly proclaiming that she's not a church woman and she doesn't neighbor, nevertheless takes the forlorn family's fortunes into her own large and capable hands. No one knows the ins and outs of the town better than she does, and as the summer turns into autumn, Mrs. Dowdel works her own kind of miracle on every member of the family. Oh, it takes the Halloween appearance of a fake Kickapoo Princess' ghost, the comeuppance of Roscoe Burdick and his accomplices which halts his draft-dodging ways and ends with a shotgun wedding to scheming high school queen Vaynetta Blalock, saving Phyllis from his scruffy attentions and getting at least one Burdick out of town. By book's end, Bob's mother has a proper Methodist Christmas choir to lead, his dad has an overflowing sanctuary and new windows, courtesy of Mrs. Dowdel's jam sales at the triumphant funeral of the Kickapoo Princess led by Rev. Barnhart. And Bob Barnhart, having successfully steered their old car, "The Pickle," on a wild ride into the woods for Mrs. Dowdel's free Christmas tree, feels himself well on the way to manhood.

Richard Peck's newest, A Season of Gifts (Dial, 2009), brings back the memorable Grandma Dowdel of his Newbery books, A Long Way From Chicago (Puffin Modern Classics) and A Year Down Yonder, still feisty and masterful twenty years later, as she finds young people who need her to take their lives by the horns as she did for her grandchildren Joey and Mary Alice a generation earlier.

As Richard Peck shows us in those hilarious and heartwarming books, he excels at stories of the American heartland, set geographically as they are in the Midwest, but also set emotionally squarely in the heart, the place where children--and their elders--really live. As the critic at Kirkus Reviews puts it, "Pitch-perfect prose, laced with humor and poignancy, strong characterization and a clear development of the theme of the gifts one person can offer make this one of Peck's best novels yet-and that's saying something."