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Buried at the bottom of Sharon Waxman's Times piece on the "new" trend of cynical Christmas films (Christmas with the Kranks, Surviving Christmas, Bad Santa , and Home Alone get name checked, but, curiously, a bona fide classic of Christmas cynicism, A Christmas Story isn't mentioned once) is this strange little pitch by author David Thomson:

Mr. Thomson [says] he has tried, so far unsuccessfully, to interest Hollywood decision makers in a Christmas story from World War I that he first heard as a child. The story goes that one morning on Dec. 25, after months of warfare across German-English battle lines, the soldiers decided to lay down their arms, come out of the trenches and mingle and play soccer, just for the day... "I've been trying to sell it to people for ages," Mr. Thomson said. "But they say: 'I don't know. People wouldn't believe it happened.'"


So like, we can use The Times to pitch our movies now? Sweet!

Also, wasn't the whole cease fire leads to soccer thing the premise of Paul McCartney's 1983 "Pipes of Peace" video (above)?
Onscreen, It's the Season of Cynicism [NYT]
A Christmas Story [WB]
Pipes of Peace [Paul McCartney Filmography]