Keep the home fires burning. I’ve often wondered where that saying came from. To me, it means to let your home be a welcome place, a peaceful place, a safe place, for your family to come home to at the end of their busy, sometimes hard, day of work.
Here are a few quotes by one of my favorite authors, E.G. White:
The home is a place where every heavenly grace may be developed. Make your home to your children the place where they will ever turn for help and cheer and uplifting. Make it a place where the Lord will delight to dwell.
Let the evenings be spent as happily as possible. Let home be a place where cheerfulness, courtesy, and love exist. This will make it attractive to the children.
Above all things, parents should surround their children with an atmosphere of cheerfulness, courtesy, and love. A home where love dwells and where it finds expression in looks, in words, in acts, is a place where angels delight to dwell. Parents, let the sunshine of love, cheer, and happy content enter your own hearts, and let its sweet influence pervade the home. Manifest a kindly, forbearing spirit, and encourage the same in your children, cultivating all those graces that will brighten the home life. The atmosphere thus created will be to the children what air and sunshine are to the vegetable world, promoting health and vigor of mind and body.
Angels of heaven often visit the home in which the will of God bears sway. Under the power of divine grace, such a home becomes a place of refreshing to worn, weary pilgrims.
The phrase has another meaning, established during World War I. It’s the title of a song.
Keep the Home Fires Burning
Song by John McCormack
They were summoned from the hillside
They were called in from the glen,
And the country found them ready
At the stirring call for men.
Let no tears add to their hardships
As the soldiers pass along,
And although your heart is breaking
Make it sing this cheery song
Keep the Home Fires Burning,
While your hearts are yearning,
Though your lads are far away
They dream of home.
There’s a silver lining
Through the dark clouds shining,
Turn the dark cloud inside out
‘Til the boys come home.
Overseas there came a pleading,
“Help a nation in distress.”
And we gave our glorious laddies
Honour bade us do no less,
For no gallant son of freedom
To a tyrant’s yoke should bend,
And a noble heart must answer
To the sacred call of “Friend.”
Keep the Home Fires Burning,
While your hearts are yearning,
Though your lads are far away
They dream of home.
There’s a silver lining
Through the dark clouds shining,
Turn the dark cloud inside out
‘Til the boys come home.