"Over by Christmas" lacks the official source memory gives it

John Bull reports that attempts to find a senior official source for the promise of a war over by Christmas have failed. He distinguishes this from the phrase's circulation and later ironic use. Recruitment offers a separate test of the belief that volunteers expected a quick war: another surge followed after the first wartime Christmas had passed. Those men still enlisted despite the visible failure of any prediction that the fighting would end that year. A pub origin remains a proposed explanation, supported by the dense social networks through which remarks could travel, rather than an identified first speaker.