Opinion editor’s note: Editorials represent the opinions of the Minnesota Star Tribune Editorial Board, which operates independently from the newsroom.
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President John F. Kennedy had been shot dead 32 days earlier when the nation observed Christmas in 1963. Many Americans were still grieving while also cautiously assessing a long Cold War that showed signs of thaw. The country remained a few years away from full scale deployment in Vietnam under President Lyndon B. Johnson, and the moment carried restrained optimism.
Our editorial predecessors, writing 62 years ago today, warned of a widening partisan divide driven by clashes between a radical right and a radical left. Even so, the prevailing mood was introspection and hope for a safer global and domestic future.
With that context, we are pleased to share an editorial of season’s greetings from our archives, part of a holiday tradition once common in newspapers nationwide. The editorial below, published Dec. 25, 1963, under the headline “Christmas: The Lightening Horizons,” appeared in the Minneapolis Morning Tribune, a predecessor to what became the Minnesota Star Tribune in 2024.
Season’s greetings from our 2025 editorial staff and our editorial colleagues from 1963.
Christmas: The Lightening Horizons
The Christmas dawns with faint streaks of hope on the horizons of the world. The centuries-old dream of “peace on earth and good will toward men” has not yet been realized, but hope for its fulfillment seems to have a warmer glow today than on any Christmas in recent years.
What the late Mr. Kennedy referred to as “the pause in the cold war” continues. There is no assurance, of course, that the slow thawing of the glacial mass will go on; but we can be grateful for each vagrant sign of thaw, from the nuclear test ban treaty to the Christmas breaching of the Berlin wall.
