To answer some of the questions our subscribers have been asking about how TIME gathers, verifies, writes and distributes its news.

Dear Subscriber

Practically any other week I envy the exciting life of TIME'S correspondents on history-making fronts all around the world--but Christmas is a time when everybody wishes he was home. And this was a strange far-away Christmas for many of our TIME people.

Harry Zinder spent Christmas Day in Bethlehem in Judea, watching the thousands of pilgrims (so many of them American boys and girls in uniform this year) who flock to worship above the manger where Christ was laid when there was no room for Mary and Joseph at the inn.

Will Lang was at the front with the Fifth Army fighting its way through the snow-capped Apennines--and "Christmas was just another day." Fill Calhoun, with the Canadians nearer the Adriatic, was quartered in an ex-Fascist's home among the minefields of Ortona--a home that was elegant enough until the retreating Germans vandalized the plumbing along with the statuary.

Many of the 34 people in our London office spent the day in bed getting over the flu that is epidemic there--or else resting up to fight it off. But Bill Walton helped a group of our flyers give a Christmas Eve party for 40 British orphans, and next morning he was up before the bugler going from Nissen hut to Nissen hut stuffing presents in the stockings of sleeping soldiers.

Some of our correspondents ate Christmas dinner in style. Steve Laird was invited to a castle outside London where he "drank good wine and listened to 1928 American phonograph records." In Cairo P. B. Stoyan dined in Oriental splendor at the home of an Egyptian Bey, a good Moslem who allowed neither women nor wine at the three-hour feast (which included five meat courses). In the Argentine Holland McCombs played host to the bachelor correspondents with an asado (barbecue) right on the edge of the pampas. And half the world away in New Delhi Bill Fisher, Bill Vandivert, Jim Shepley and Teddy White took over the mud-walled kitchen of their lodgings to cook their own really royal turkey dinner (25 pounds of it, at a cost of only $1 in American money).

Busiest Christmas was probably Dick Lauterbach's in snow-covered Moscow. Christmas Eve there was a get-together for the little American colony--Christmas Day he played Father Frost by distributing precious American soap to the hotel staff--and next day he impersonated Ambassador Harriman in the annual Moscow correspondents' show.

Farthest north was Stockholm Correspondent John Scott, who planned to spend Christmas Day skiing with 70 interned American airmen near Falun in central Sweden. But Hart Preston was looking forward to beating the heat of Christmas in Rio with a day at the beach.

Over in South Africa John Barkham and his daughter Jennifer Lynne paid their annual Christmas call at the farm of Field Marshal Jan Christiaan Smuts. And out in the Pacific William Chickering reached Hawaii from Guadalcanal in time to have Christmas dinner with Bernard Clayton and go to a hula-hula lawn party.

But not all TIME correspondents are spending their holidays in far places this year. Robert Sherrod was back from Tarawa for Christmas at home with his wife and two sons. Jack Belden, veteran of the wars in China, Burma, North Africa, Sicily and Italy, celebrated Christmas Day in a New York hospital, recuperating from the leg wound he got at Salerno (this was his first Christmas in his own country in ten years). But I guess the TIME & LIFE people an American Christmas meant most to this year were Carl and Shelley Mydans--back in the U.S via the Gripsholm after two years as prisoners of the Japs.

Cordially,

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