photo #8808843

Jimmy on December 1, 2025

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On the sands of snow ….

On the faces of my friends

On each outstretched hand

I write your name …. Liberty

- Excerpts from the poem "Liberté" by Paul Eluard, 1942

Every year at Farleys House, the home of Lee Miller and Roland Penrose and now the Lee Miller Archives, we participate in the village Christmas window Advent calendar and this year we will be opening ours on the 1st December.

2025 marked the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Dachau and other concentration camps. Also the celebrations for VE Day and VJ Day marking the end of WW2, but war and conflict are still close to home today.

Our image this year reflects the mixed year we have had. Here we see three soldiers of the French Foreign Legion's 13th Demi-Brigade (shown wearing the now-iconic green beret which was adopted by all Foreign Legion units in 1959) sledging in the harsh winter of 1944/1945 as Lee Miller described in her dispatches ‘Legionnaires seen cavorting’, and taking time out from the Battle of the Colmar pocket (Operation Grandslam).

Hopefully we will have fun in the snow this Christmas and we can all find our ‘time out’ to celebrate and reflect with family and friends over this festive season. As the legionnaires do, the entire unit celebrates Christmas Eve (Réveillon) together as a surrogate family, and don’t return home on leave.

So whether it’s Bredeles biscuits from the Alsace, Stollen cake from Germany, or Kutia, the sweet porridge from the Ukraine - whatever your Christmas tradition includes, from all of us here at Farleys House & Gallery and the Lee Miller Archives, we wish you a very Merry Christmas and peaceful New Year.

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