There are lots of heart-warming stories about soldiers making their own bit of Christmas during WWII by doing things like dressing up as St. Nick and having parties for the local children.

My favorite is a family story. It didn’t happen exactly on Christmas, but it did happen during the fall and winter of 1944/45.

My father was a toddler when the Germans occupied his hometown of Maastricht. He was seven when the Americans liberated the city. His family lived in Wyck, on the other side of the Maas River from the center of town. There’s a very old stone bridge there in the place where the Romans built a wooden bridge, the Sint Servaasbrug. The Americans captured the bridge before the Germans could blow it up and then put gun emplacements on both ends to keep it standing and their materiel rolling over it.

The gun crews on the Wyck side of the bridge had their own small, portable canteen where they cooked their food. It was the usual army food except when the cook made donuts. They were the small cake donuts that are fried in oil.

When the aroma of frying donuts wafted through the neighborhood every child went running to the bridge. They knew the GIs would give them one without any need for ration cards. In that cold winter before the war was won, a donut from the Americans was better than a visit from Santa Claus.