Christmas accessories during the 1940s cost virtually nothing. Our tree-topping star was a cardboard cutout covered with wrinkled tinfoil. It looked loopy on the tree, but it was ours. My grandmother made it. Thank God she was a homemaker and not a surgeon.

Our lopsided star lived in a box with the other decorations: strings of lights, tinfoil icicles removed each year and saved for next Christmas, limp strings of tired tinsel, and colorful glass balls that would break if you glared at them. A handful of angels, stars, and Santas completed the cache.

My grandmother’s house was neither rich nor poor, and it also contained my grandfather (called Pop), my grandmother (called Mom), one aunt, my younger first cousin, and me.

Despite wartime dislocations, we had Christmas. And we decorated for it.

During the second week of December, Pop gathered up available family members and hauled us out into the country to saw down a tree, usually a six-foot cedar. We never used pine trees because they dried out and the needles fell off. The same was, of course, true of cedars, but somehow that subject never came up.

Once the tree was home, Pop nailed two boards to its trunk for a stand, Mom chose its best side, and decorating began. My cousin was two, and I was four, which made us less help and more trouble than a pair of Labradors. We could step on a bulb or two, but that was about it.

We wrapped the tree with strings of lights that were wired in series, meaning that if one bulb failed, they all went out. You had to unscrew each bulb and try a new one. When the string lighted back up, you knew you’d found the bad bulb. Our timeworn tinsel and recycled icicles went on the tree followed by ornaments. Pop ended the tree ceremony with his annual near-fall into the tree as he tried to position the star. Then someone plugged our festive firetrap into the wall, and magic lit the room.

We were ready for Christmas, and we’d got that way inexpensively—a word you use when you don’t want to say cheap. The total investment in decorations, beginning with the free tree, might have reached $20.00—a lavish sum spread out over no telling how many years.

Decorating today is an ornament of a different color. I Googled “Christmas decorations for sale” and looked at what’s available in modern Yuletide festoonery.

The trees are all artificial, and I guarantee they don’t smell like Christmas. A six-footer will cost you over $200.00. For $599.99 you can get a flocked version that hints at having been snowed on.

Traditional ornaments and tinsel ropes remain surprising bargains. Target offers 50 red balls for a giveaway $15.00, billing them shatterproof. Target must sell exclusively to childless homes.

One merchant, with “Recession Busting Prices,” has strings of lights for under $10.00. That’s so cheap you worry that Underwriters Laboratories may be asleep at the switch. But the same merchant also sells a giant pre-lighted artificial outdoor tree for a whimper-inducing $9,999.99. Pop would have sold the house for that.

For $13.99, you can have an 18-inch wreath for the door—a lighted “country twig” creation that looks like a white wire brush for your electric drill. A two-pack of artificial pine wreaths sells for as much as $169.99. But here’s the horrible part: the things come in colors beginning with traditional green and deteriorating to sky blue, sea foam green, and chartreuse.

It doesn’t end there. There’s a Santa suit with a 70-inch waistline, a foam-rubber Santa Claus beer cozy, personalized tree ornaments in birthstone colors, and enough Elvis ornaments to tacky-up Las Vegas.

There are also websites that help you make your own ornaments, but the first one I looked into announced it was going to teach me to make non-edible ornaments out of cookie dough. How much fun could that be?

Merry Christmas.

Hang That Tree Ornament and the Merchant Who Sold It to You The Saturday Evening Post

Oh, he’s dead, all right; Vonnegut, the author of 14 novels and numerous short stories, passed away in 2007. But like Billy Pilgrim—the World War II soldier and protagonist of Vonnegut’s masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five—the writer has come “unstuck in time,” popping on and off the world stage, influencing culture from beyond the grave.

Take this summer’s book banning, for instance. The school board in Republic, Missouri, voted unanimously to remove Slaughterhouse-Five from its high school library for allegedly teaching principles contrary to the Bible. The move backfired, prompting protests and a surge in demand for the novel at the town’s public library.

“To hell with the censors!” Vonnegut once said. “Give me knowledge or give me death!”

Seeing the developing situation in Missouri, volunteers at the not-for-profit Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library in his hometown of Indianapolis offered to send every student at the high school a free copy of the writer’s science fiction novel.

No, Kurt Vonnegut isn’t going to go away so easily. This year has also seen the opening of the Vonnegut Library, paperback reissues of his books, and two new biographies in celebration of what would have been his 89th birthday on November 11.

But why do people still care about Vonnegut’s writing? What makes him still relevant? According to Charles J. Shields, author of And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life, one of the two biographies, it comes down to the universality of his message: “His writings, which come from the center of the most violent century in human history, simply ask, ‘Why are we here?’”

For Vonnegut, that was always a loaded question. In The Sirens of Titan he wrote, “A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.” But this love was tempered by random obstacles thrown in man’s way. Vonnegut viewed man’s struggle as the attempt to find (and give) kindness and love in an otherwise uncaring universe—a world-view shaped by his life experiences.

Born in 1922, Vonnegut was part of a prominent German-American family—until the stock market crash in 1929 forced them to scale back. After struggling for years to come to grips with the family’s reduced circumstances, Vonnegut’s mother committed suicide on Mother’s Day, 1944. The writer later confessed that his greatest fear was that he, too, would commit suicide; indeed, the chronically depressed author would attempt to kill himself 40 years after his mother’s death.

Around the time of his mother’s suicide, a fresh-out-of-college Vonnegut went to Europe to fight in World War II. Captured almost immediately during the Battle of the Bulge, he was held as a prisoner of war in Dresden, a German city known for its art, culture, and architecture. On the night of February 13, 1945, the Allies firebombed Dresden, destroying the historic city and killing between 25,000 and 35,000 people, primarily civilians. Although Vonnegut and his fellow POWs survived the bombing holed up in an underground meat locker-turned-prison nicknamed “Slaughterhouse Five,” they were devastated by the experience. The soldiers were forced to spend the next several weeks collecting the remains of the dead while the local people threw rocks at them.

“Both the Depression and the war taught Vonnegut that we are not nearly as in control of our destinies as our egos and the mythology of the ‘American Dream’ would have us believe,” says Gregory D. Sumner, author of the second recent biography, Unstuck in Time: A Journey Through Kurt Vonnegut’s Life and Novels.

After the war, Vonnegut began writing for magazines, including The Saturday Evening Post. “The No-Talent Kid” (reprinted in our Mar/Apr 2011 issue and available online) was the first of nearly a dozen short stories that he wrote for the Post. Although Vonnegut’s magazine short stories were primarily melodramas and romances, he was also drawn to science fiction. “Vonnegut was convinced he couldn’t write about the issues facing Americans during the Cold War—hydrogen bombs, conformity, materialism—in conventional ways,” Shields says. “But in science fiction, a writer can ask, ‘What if?’ and take a concept to the limit of credibility.”

In the early 1960s, Vonnegut decided to write about his experiences in World War II. But he faced a problem. “When he took shelter in the slaughterhouse, there was a city,” Shields explains. “When he came up again, the city was gone. How could he write a war novel with no middle? The solution, he discovered, was time travel.”

In Slaughterhouse-Five, the main character, Billy Pilgrim, finds himself bouncing uncontrollably through time, living his life out of sequence—including his experience as a POW during World War II and his time as an exhibit in an alien zoo on another planet. Despite the conceits of the sci-fi genre, the book grapples with the very notion of war. Released in 1969 at the height of the Vietnam War, Slaughterhouse-Five resonated profoundly with the American public, reaching number one on The New York Times best-seller list and pushing Vonnegut to the forefront of pop culture.

“Young people in particular embraced its deglorification of war and experimental style,” Sumner says. “But its universal themes transcend period or place. The book is very popular, for example, with solders and veterans of the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Vonnegut used his newfound fame to transform himself into what he called a “responsible elder,” speaking at peace rallies and becoming an opponent of war in all its forms. In an age where the U.S. is still embroiled in conflicts across the globe, his message remains relevant, especially with the young; a new crop of Vonnegut fans enters college each fall.

Again, why do people—young and old—still read Vonnegut?

“Because of his honesty, wit, and faith in people, despite their flaws and the tragedies of life,” Sumner replies. “Because the seemingly ‘childish’ questions he asked, the apparently ‘simple’ style of expression he used, hold a profundity that the critics often missed.”

When released, some prominent critics did, indeed, mistake Slaughterhouse-Five’s simple prose style for plain simpleness, but history sides with Vonnegut’s legion of fans; the book is included in both Time magazine’s and Modern Library’s lists of the 100 best novels of the 20th century.

Not that Vonnegut would have been concerned about his legacy, mind you. “I don’t console myself with the idea that my descendents and my books and all that will live on,” he told a Post reporter in 1986. “I honestly believe, though, that we are wrong to think that moments go away, never to be seen again. This moment and every moment last forever.”

Kurt Vonnegut is dead.

Long live Kurt Vonnegut.

Click here to read “Miss Temptation,” one of the 11 stories that Vonnegut wrote for the Post. To view the writer’s personal artifacts on display at the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library, go here.

Vonnegut Lives! The Saturday Evening Post

During the battle of Leyte Gulf in the Philippines, ships of America’s 7th fleet surprised a large taskforce of the Japanese fleet at Suriago Bay. Late in the ensuring gun battle between battleships, the Mississippi fired a salvo at the retreating Japanese ships. No one could have known at the time, but that twelve-gun volley was the last salvo fired by one battleship at another. The era of the decisive naval battle was ending.

For over 300 years, battleships had been one of the most important weapons a nation possessed.  By dominating sea lanes, battleships could decide the outcome of wars and the fates of nations.But after this last salvo, battleships stopped engaging each other in direct, decisive battle, and naval warfare came to rely on air and underwater forces.

Just as the age of the battleship ended, the age of the suicide bomber began. This is how William L. Worden, writing for the Post in 1945, described the appearance of kamikazes in Leyte Gulf.

A kamikaze pilot attacks the USS Columbia.

A lone aircraft comes out of a cloud with a strange deliberation. It reaches a spot over the outer rim of ships, and then, seeming more deliberate than ever, the plane tips over into a steep nosedive. It is not a smooth dive. Tracers cut holes in the plane before it is well started down. Bigger shells take off pieces of the wings and crash into the cockpit. But the plane is traveling on a near-vertical course and does not veer.

The plane crashes head-on into the rigging of a ship. A cargo boom swings wildly, wreathed in fire from the plane’s gasoline tanks. The plane [crashes] through radio aerials and cargo lines, and into the sea a hundred feet beyond the target vessel. There it burns awhile, then sinks.

Conservatively, there have been well over 1,000 such dives against shipping all the way from the Philippines to the sea 100 miles off the mouth of Tokyo Bay. ["Kamikaze: Aerial Banzai Charge," William L. Worden, June 23, 1945]

Suicide dives were not new, as Worden pointed out, nor were they unknown among American fliers.

Individual airmen of most of the world’s flying forces [have], at one time or another, used it as a desperate last-minute attack when they knew they were going to crash anyhow.

You may remember that Maj. Lofton Henderson, of the Marine Corps—for whom Henderson Field at Guadalcanal is named— was last seen diving his flaming, bomb-laden plane into the deck of a Jap carrier that was trying to flee from Midway.

It was also during the battle of Midway that fifteen pilots from a Navy Torpedo Squadron flew directly into the fire of Japanese ships knowing they had almost no chance of survival. (Just one pilot survived.)

The difference between a true suicide dive and the attacks Torpedo Squadron 8 made is an almost indistinguishable hair line.

A kamikaze pilot steers his plane toward a collision with the USS White Plains, October 25, 1944.

The important difference, Worden said, was the official nature of these suicide tactics. The Japanese military had purposely ordered the strategic suicide, making it a part of official government strategy.

Did it work? Official military reports at war’s end concluded that kamikazes had sunk 34 and damaged 368 ships. They had also killed 300 and wounded over 4,000 American servicemen.

The Japanese military might have thought kamikaze attacks would ensure victory. But by the end of the battle for Leyte Gulf, even they realized it was hopeless. Still they ordered their men to continue flying into U.S. ships. And they assured their men that vast numbers of kamikazes were held in reserve to halt any American invasion of Japan. In another Post article, a captured Japanese air commander told his American interrogator that—

“we had a plan to send out our entire kamikaze strength—more than two thousand planes—in wave after wave.”

What damage did be estimate this would have inflicted?

” Fifty to seventy-five per cent of your force,” he said. “All the carriers. Many other ships as well.” He added that they would have saved some six hundred of their best new fighter planes for a last-ditch aerial defense of the homeland. ["A Japanese Officer Explains Nippon Mistakes," Lt. S.P. Walker, USNR, Nov. 11, 1945]

The Japanese military hadn’t expected that their kamikazes would motivate the Navy to be more vigilant and to fight smarter. They hadn’t considered losing and answering for their barbarities. They couldn’t have dreamed that their suicide bombers would be a factor in America’s decision to use a nuclear weapon on them.

A government that employs suicide attacks ignores the historic failure of terrorism, the inevitable day of earthly reckoning with an outraged enemy, and the fact that America can’t always be relied on to forgive and forget. By stiffening the resolve of its enemies, terrorists forge the weapon that will destroy themselves.

Broadsides and Suicides: How War Changed During Three Days The Saturday Evening Post

Vonnegut’s Typewriter: Vonnegut used this Smith-Corona Coronamatic 2200 during the 1970s to write books such as Breakfast of Champions and Jailbird. A bit of a technophobe, he never switched to word processors or computers, preferring the tactile nature of the typewriter instead.

Vonnegut’s Purple Heart: Vonnegut sardonically wrote in his final novel, Timequake, “I myself was awarded my country’s second-lowest decoration, a Purple Heart for frost-bite.”

A Pack of Vonnegut’s Pall Mall Cigarettes: Throughout his life, Vonnegut was a smoker, a habit he dubbed “a classy way to commit suicide.” His children found this unopened pack of Pall Malls, his preferred brand, behind his bookcase after he died.

An Unopened Letter from Vonnegut’s Father: Vonnegut’s father, Kurt Sr., wrote this letter to his son during World War II, but it was lost in the mail for quite some time. When Vonnegut finally did receive it, he never opened it—and it remains sealed to this day.

Ceremonial Nazi Sword: Vonnegut wrote in Chapter 1 of Slaughterhouse-Five, “O’Hare didn’t have any souvenirs. Almost everybody else did. I had a ceremonial Luftwaffe saber, still do.”

Rooster Lamp: Vonnegut always wrote by the light of this red rooster lamp. It originated in Indiana, traveled to the east coast with with the writer, and has now returned home to “roost.”

Alplaus Volunteer Firemen Reminder Card: In God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, the title character obsessively joins fire departments, spurred on by a horrific experience in World War II. Vonnegut did the same. He wrote in Slaughterhouse-Five that after the war he became “a volunteer firemen in the village of Alplaus, where [he] bought [his] first home.” This postcard from the Alplaus fire department, dated April 4, 1949, was sent as a reminder for a volunteers’ meeting.

Portrait of Kurt Sr.: This framed photograph of Vonnegut’s father hung on the wall of the writer’s work space for years and years.

Rejection Letter: The library has quite a few of Vonnegut’s rejection letters—he liked to save them—which are periodically rotated. This one from The Atlantic Monthly is dated August 29, 1949.

To learn more about the life and work of Kurt Vonnegut, visit the KVML at 340 N. Senate Avenue in Indianapolis. The library is open noon to 5 p.m. daily except Wednesdays (closed on Wednesdays). Admission is always free.

Treasures of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library The Saturday Evening Post