The second of our Christmas objects is this Christmas card from 1945, which was produced for the British Middle East Command. The card dates from 1945 and has the various badges of the command: 

The wide variety of badges to be seen on the front of the card are particularly interesting and represent the different territories that fell under the unit’s purview. The badges adopted by these regions often reflect the areas themselves so we have a traditional Arab sailing boat for Aden, a coastal region; a camel for Sudan where the animals were used by the natives in place of the horse as a beast of burden and for riding. Palestine has a traditional Arabic sword whilst Cyrenaica has a ruined temple, the area being rife with Roman ruins. Badges had to bee simple to embroider, easy to recognise at a glance and ideally have some sort of meaning that made sense to those in the unit to encourage esprit-de-corps. The bold simple designs here certainly seem to meet that requirement.