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A curious thing happened in Europe 97 years ago this week. Men who had been trying to kill each other suddenly stopped shooting. They started singing together, exchanging Christmas greetings and giving one another presents. But when the authorities from their respective governments got involved, they had to give it up. They were forced to go back to killing each other.

Human societies spend a lot of time and effort to keep a tiny minority of people from hurting and killing each other. Governments have elaborate systems of police and courts to protect most people — who just want to be left alone — from that tiny minority. But when politicians get angry with each other across borders, they expect something quite absurd. They expect people who want to live in peace to suddenly hate other people enough to kill them. The desire for peace is a hard thing for the politicians to get out of stubborn humans.

The narrative we normally hear is just the opposite — that humans are so violent and so war-like that society would be nothing but chaos and killing without benevolent governments agreeing to control things. But the evidence suggests that the story is far more complex than that.

The Christmas truce of 1914 was very unofficial. It wasn’t observed in all places. But in the midst of the slaughter of World War I — seen as the Great War to end all wars at the time — British, German and French soldiers spontaneously made temporary peace with one another. They came out of their trenches and socialized. Obviously, the didn’t hate one another.

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For many children, the passing of years is marked by when they got for Christmas. There was the train set when I was 3 (which you see above), walkie talkies and a “spy kit” when I was 9, chemistry set and electrical experiment kit when I was 11, and books for most years thereafter. The things I got seemed to reflect who I was and how the people around me saw me. I wonder how much our childhood gifts shape us?

I’m thinking about this because of different presents I’m seeing for kids around me today. Two contrasting examples stand out, because they represent entirely different approaches, at least in my mind.

A couple of my friends have a beautiful and charming young daughter named Linnea. Among Linnea’s Christmas pictures this morning, there’s a whole series of her with her 36 new containers of Play-Doh. She looks happy, and it makes me imagine all the things she’s going to pull out of her little imagination and bring to life with those little pieces of modeling clay.

A 12-year-old neighbor of mine named Joseph came running over to me excitedly a couple of hours ago to tell me that he had gotten an iPhone 4S for Christmas. He knows that I have an iPhone and he’s told me about wanting one before, so he couldn’t wait to tell me about his.

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All over the world, kids and adults are waking up to find out what Santa brought them. Most made it onto the “nice” list, at least enough to get some presents. Some folks got nothing but coal in their stockings, though, because they’ve been very naughty. Let’s look at a few of them.

Anthony Weiner — Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner was under the impression that he could send sexually suggestive pictures of himself to random women on Twitter — and nobody would notice (especially his wife). After first denying that he had been sexting with women, he finally had to confess and then eventually resign in June. Santa brought him coal and a gift certificate for a good divorce lawyer.

Tom Whatley — You have no reason to have heard of Alabama state Sen. Tom Whatley, but his hypocrisy and lack of judgment make him a candidate for high political office in the future. Whatley was using a swinger sex site called Adult Friend Finder to find … well … you know what kind of sleaze he was looking for. This “conservative” Republican ran for the Alabama Senate on a “family values” platform and his bio assures us that he’s a good Methodist, but he seems to have the values of the Hugh Hefner family. Some of the women who he contacted online for sex figured out who he was and sent out packets to various Alabama politicians documenting his shady private life. The sleazeball has been laying low since then. Santa brought him coal and the address of a nearby STD clinic.

Van Jones — The Obama administration’s former “green energy czar” deserves a stocking full of coal. Being part of an administration that’s thrown billions of our tax dollars down the drain on failed kooky “green” schemes is bad enough, but the real reason he gets coal is just the delicious irony of it all. Santa brought him a trainload of coal, which he sold to an evil power plant.

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