And that makes it hard to get back to work.

It's December, and time for a Christmas story. One of my favorites also happens to be true: the “Christmas Truce” between German and British soldiers fighting trench warfare during Christmas 1914.

It began with some German soldiers illuminating their trenches and singing Christmas carols. British troops responded with carols of their own. Soon emissaries from both camps were meeting in no-man's-land to exchange whiskey and cigars. Some put up small Christmas trees on the parapets of their trenches; others organized impromptu soccer games. Not a shot was fired on either side.

“Several factors combined to produce the conditions for this Christmas Truce,” according to Smithsonian.com. “By December 1914, the men in the trenches were veterans, familiar enough with the realities of combat to have lost much of the idealism that they had carried into war…The war, they had believed, would be over by Christmas, yet there they were in Christmas week still muddied, cold and in battle.”

To quote a British soldier who was there: “How could we resist wishing each other a Merry Christmas, even though we might be at each other's throats immediately afterwards?”

Between the implosion of the global economy in 2008 and the subsequent sniping—between liberal and conservative, government and business, employer and employee, young and old, black and white, female and male—I would say that most of us are battle fatigued, exhausted and devoid of any of the idealism that might have originally carried us into battle. It should have all been over by now; but it isn't.

So fellow veterans, let's lay down our arms—even if just for a day—and heal ourselves before we return to the battle of trying to set the world right. 

Merry Christmas. And let's try to make 2013 a better year than the last.