Staff Sgt. Carroll "Bud" Kelsh wasn't one of the lucky ones who made it home for Christmas following the end of World War II in 1945.
After spending three months recovering in French and English hospitals from wounds he sustained during the Battle of the Bulge, the wireman from the 78th Infantry Signal Company found himself returned to duty in bombed-out Berlin.
Kelsh and soldiers from his unit scavenged copper wire and found some light bulbs. They strung them around a 35-foot-tall evergreen miraculously left standing on the famed Unter den Linden, a boulevard whose name refers to a type of tree.
He later told his family that the tree was a unifying symbol that brought together German citizens and the occupying U.S. soldiers.
Eighty years after the lights were plugged into a humming Army generator, the spirit of what has been described as the "greatest celebration in American history" endures.
"I think it's a reminder that we as an American people can be unified," Kelsh's son, Bruce Kelsh, said recently from his Oregon home. "I think it's also a reminder of when America was seen after the war as kind and generous and forgiving, and that's very much in the spirit of Christmas."
The U.S. declaration of war on Germany came on Dec. 11, 1941, four days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on Dec. 7. The attack prompted U.S. entry into WWII, and American forces were deployed to the Pacific and European theaters.
The first action Kelsh saw was in the Battle of the Bulge, a last-gasp German offensive to rupture the Allied lines in December 1944 and January 1945, he said during an oral history interview with the Fargo (N.D.) Air Museum in 2007.
Kelsh was hit in the chest with shrapnel from a large artillery round and knocked unconscious while laying wire on the German side of the Rhine River. He received a Purple Heart for his injuries.
The surrender of Germany on May 8, 1945, happened while he was in the hospital. On Sept. 2, the war in the Pacific came to a close weeks after the atomic bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Even before Japan's surrender, there was a strong public outcry to bring back the millions of troops overseas in time for Christmas, using the slogan "Home Alive By '45," according to the website of National World War II Museum in New Orleans.
As a result, the Army and Navy launched Operation Santa Claus, an effort to process military discharges in record time. Operation Magic Carpet transported an average of 22,000 Americans home per day for a year.
Soldiers and sailors streamed stateside using any available means to have the long-anticipated opportunity to lock loved ones in warm yuletide embraces.
December 1945 was the busiest month of Magic Carpet, with nearly 700,000 service members being returned, the museum website states.
The celebration at the White House and in New York City's Rockefeller Center promised to be the biggest in years, author Matthew Litt wrote in his book "Christmas 1945: The Story of the Greatest Celebration in American History."
Such exhaustive planning stood in contrast to the makeshift merriment that U.S. troops like Kelsh had to devise.
World War II had reduced much of the Continent to rubble. In Berlin, 600,000 apartments were destroyed and only 2.8 million of the city's original 4.3 million inhabitants remained, the city website states.
"We didn't have the light bulb sockets, but we found a place in Berlin," he told his interviewers in 2007, a glint in his eye. "We wired these things all together in our barracks."
As a memento, he brought home a solitary photo of a soldier on a ladder after placing the star on the Tannenbaum's top.
"I think it was the first Christmas tree in Berlin after the war was over," Kelsh said in the oral history interview. "Maybe I'm wrong, but it felt good anyway."
After the war, Kelsh used the skills he had learned in communications and worked for four decades for AT&T and Northwestern Bell. He married Joyce Hardwick in 1948 and the couple had five children. He died in 2010 at 87, Bruce Kelsh said.
During Christmas 1945, the world celebrated peace for the first time in over five years.
Americans, meanwhile, united in healing, Litt said in an interview, adding that the mood was euphoric.
"Whether it was veterans who came back and sacrificed years of their lives, or even for families who had lost someone who wasn't coming home again, there was this feeling of, 'This is what it was for. My son or husband or brother didn't die in vain,' " he said.