Christmastime in a Bottle

By Clint Buffington

Gerhard Pettersson/Shutterstock.com

Every time I open a message in a bottle, I feel exactly the way I did as a kid opening presents on Christmas Day—excited, curious, grateful, and almost always surprised at what’s inside.

At my house, Christmas was always about magic, joy, love, and time with family. My family is very lucky because, in a sense, we never had to grow up: Finding messages in bottles rekindles all those feelings in us, old and tired and crotchety as we may be. When I find a message in a bottle, I am a kid again, and magic is real.

But the connection between the Christmas season and bottled messages goes far beyond my own experience of opening them like little presents lost at sea. This connection goes back at least to Charles Dickens’ short story, “A Message from the Sea,” published in the 1860 Christmas edition of his own periodical, All The Year Round. Dickens is famous for his Christmas stories, and although “A Message from the Sea” is no Christmas Carol, the themes of the story, including the redemptive powers of love, generosity, and honesty, overlap with Dickens’ other Christmas stories.

Charles Dickens imagined his stories, but what would he have made of the very real and strange situation that unfolded over the winter of 1915–16 involving several messages in bottles that were launched on Christmas Day 1915?

Maud Butler in uniform (Julie Goodall/Australian War Memorial). Article in The Bendigo Independent, page 5 (Dec. 29, 1915).

On New Year’s Day, 1916, a man walking the beach near Portland Bay in Victoria, Australia, found three bottled messages that washed up so close together, they were practically in a pile. All were written only a week before, on Christmas Day, 1915, by Australian soldiers from New South Wales en route to WWI in Europe. Two told the thrilling story of Maud Butler, a teenage girl who felt so compelled to join her brother at the European front and help in the war effort that she stowed away on a troop ship for that purpose.

According to the January 22nd, 1916, edition of the Koroit Sentinel and Tower Hill Advocate, one of the messages, written by a Ted Blakely, read as follows:

“At sea, Saturday, December 25, 1915, 4 p.m. My dear mum—I am sending this note by bottle from the Victorian coast. I hope you will get this O.K. We have just finished our Christmas dinner—turkey and pork. Everyone on board is O.K. A girl was found on board dressed as a soldier. She was going to fight with her brother at Gallipoli. Oh, well, goodbye for the present. I am, your loving son, Ted.”

Soon, a separate bottled message written about Maud Butler (at least the third about her) was found at Warrnambool Beach. This message was “written on Christmas morning by Private [Reginald] Lock, of [New South Wales] and in it he states that the previous day a girl, masquerading as a soldier, had been transferred to another boat to be taken back home. The bottle also contained a small leather kangaroo with the words ‘Australia Day’ stamped on it.”

Maud Butler after 1918 (Julie Goodall/Australian War Memorial). Article in The Koroit Sentinel and Tower Hill Advocate, Page 2 (Jan 22, 1916).

Maud shared her side of the story with The Bendigo Independent after her return, on December 29, 1915. Maud explained she had spent months carefully assembling an accurate soldier’s uniform from pieces acquired here and there and cut her hair short. But, to her deep annoyance, she could not find a pair of regulation tan boots—she could only find black ones.

When the time came to sneak aboard the ship, she did it in dashing style: avoiding the monitored gangway, she simply grabbed a rope hanging over the bow and climbed right up onto the deck. She hid until the following day when the ship was underway, then mingled with the soldiers, and no one found her out. That is, until an inspection parade was ordered. There she stood—her disguise perfect except the black boots, which stood out like a sore thumb. Once the inspecting officer saw her boots, her adventure was over.

But Maud Butler was not easily deterred from her dedication to the war effort, and soon she snuck aboard a second troop ship. She was again discovered and sent home, but you have to admire her perseverance. After this, Maud stayed in Australia and raised money for the Returned Soldiers Association. Eventually, Maud became a midwife and a nurse in the 1930s and 40s. She was respected and admired in her community and dedicated her life to service.

Another happy surprise in this story is that the authors of the two bottled messages described here—Edward “Ted” Blakely and Reginald Lock, both of New South Wales—survived the war. Both had sailed aboard the SS Suveic with Maud Butler, and both served in the 56th Battalion, which fought fiercely along the western front and endured heavy casualties. Miraculously, both were home for Christmas of 1918, after three Christmases away.

Of course, the most famous Christmastime message in a bottle of all was also born of war, and appeared in the pages of Beachcombing Volume 7: July/August 2018. American GI Frank Hayostek was desperately lonely on Christmas Day of 1945. WWII was over, but Frank was stuck on a “Liberty ship” in a frigid sea, spending his third wartime Christmas away from home. While his family gathered around the table for Christmas dinner beside a glowing fire in Pennsylvania, Frank’s chair was empty. Longing for home, Frank wrote a note seeking friendship, poetic in its simplicity and earnestness, stuck it in a brown glass aspirin bottle, and tossed it into the cold black waves.

Eight months later, on the coast of Ireland, milkmaid Breda O’Sullivan’s border collie Oscar found Frank’s bottled message. Breda wrote to Frank, which kicked off years of warm, enthusiastic, funny, even flirtatious letters between them. This friendship verged on romance, but when Frank finally traveled to meet Breda, any hope of a love spark died when Frank revealed to Breda during this visit that he’d had a previous marriage annulled. To Breda, a devout Catholic, the fact that Frank had been married before made it impossible for them to ever consider marriage. They continued to write after his visit, but less warmly and less frequently, until their correspondence dried up. Each married someone else, and that was that.

But Frank never truly got over Breda. His tombstone reads, “Frank Hayostek met in Tralee, Ireland with Breda O’Sullivan who found a message-laden bottle he had tossed from a liberty ship seven years before.” This man fought in perhaps the most important war of all time, yet the headstone inscription he chose concerns a message in a bottle. If that doesn’t speak to the power of bottled messages, I don’t know what could.

Though not romantic, two of the most emotionally powerful Christmas-centered messages in bottles I know of were found by my brother Evan.

The cruise ship Vistafjord in Piraeus in 1984 (Peter J. Fitzpatrick). Message and bottle from Andrew Tallos (Evan Buffington).

In 2008, Evan found an old, clear Tab bottle containing Norwegian American Cruise Line stationery. The paper was covered with a child’s wild scrawl. One side said: “I am on the Vistafjord. Write back to Andrew Tallos,” with his address in Stamford, Connecticut. The other side read: “1973 Dec 29.” The message was 35 years old when Evan found it—older than he himself. But, other than being old, it’s a pretty simple message, right? Not much emotional power there, you may think.

Well, the Stamford Advocate helped Evan track down Andrew Tallos, and the two spoke on the phone. According to the Stamford Advocate, Andrew had “forgotten all about the bottle,” and was stunned it had been found after 35 years. Memories faded back into view as Andrew dug up photos from the cruise, including one of himself receiving a gift from Santa on board.

Andrew’s sister, Lisa, was on that cruise—she explained why it meant so much. Their father was a pilot, their mother a stewardess. This created an unusual childhood in that they would occasionally be pulled out of school for long periods while the family traveled. Sadly, their father died of pancreatic cancer in 1973, when Andrew was 11. Six months later, their mother took Andrew and Lisa on this bittersweet Christmas cruise.

“One night after dinner,” according to the Stamford Advocate, “the Tallos family gathered at the stern of the ship and helped compose the message in a bottle… [Then] they sealed the bottle and threw it off the back of the Vistafjord.”

That was December 29, 1973. Tragically, in 1975, when Andrew was just 13, he and Lisa’s mother died of lung cancer. “It rocks your confidence to the core to lose both of your parents so young. We never had anyone to ask questions to – what’s right or wrong,” Lisa told the Stamford Advocate.

Lisa explained that their 1973 Christmas cruise was “the last happy memory they had as a family”. And that, that last happy memory, is what Evan found in the Tab bottle—so much more than just “a message.”

Evan told the Stamford Advocate, “[This message in a bottle] is part of our history, and it’s part of someone else’s…I hope this creates…peace of mind for Andrew and his sister—that it completes part of a childhood that ended in sorrow.” Lisa hoped for the same, adding, “I like to believe in that kind of fairytale ending.”

Cruise ship Fedor Dostoevskiy in 1990 (Ulrich Dagge). Message in bottle photos by Clint Buffington.

Strangely, Evan found another Christmastime message in a bottle in 2015 with a very similar story.

In 1994, Gerda Brzezicka of Germany was heartbroken after the death of her husband. To commemorate him and bring some joy back into her family’s life, she took her daughter, Christa, on a Christmas cruise aboard the MS Fedor Dostojewskij, known today as the MS Astor. According to the German newspaper Bild, Gerda’s lifelong dream was to have a fancy dinner in a cocktail dress on a cruise. Together, Gerda and Christa did exactly that.

Unbeknownst to Christa, one night, Gerda went out on deck and sent a message in a bottle while the ship was between Tenerife and Cape Verde. In 2008, Gerda passed away—the same year Evan found Andrew Tallos’s bottled note. Seven years later, Evan found Gerda’s message.

“We were inseparable,” Christa told Bild, “It was hard for me to accept that I would never hear from her again.”

But in 2017, when Evan opened the bottle, Christa did get to hear from her mother again, thanks to Evan and the strange magic of messages in bottles.

The message doesn’t appear to say much more than Gerda’s name and address, and perhaps a brief note we can’t decipher. But, as I always say: It doesn’t matter how long the message is, what matters is what it means to the people involved. For Christa, this message meant a great deal. She told Bild, “That was our happiest time. The great food, the many trips, and then my mother also won a voucher for a jeweler at bingo.” Just pure, simple happiness with family—the greatest treasure on earth—lost, until Evan found it.

All these Christmastime messages in bottles, however different their origins and authors may be, orbit some of the core ideas that underlie the Christmas season—the power of love, family, and the importance of time together. From Maud Butler, trying fiercely to reach her brother on the front lines of WWI, to the Tallos and Brzezicka families who cherished their too-short time together, we see a familiar truth: Messages in bottles contain entire worlds. Small as they are, they manage to carry the whole human experience, from love to loss, from celebration to mourning, and everything in between.

As beachcombers, we are stewards of much more than just our washed-up trinkets and “treasures.” We are stewards of history, of memories, of other people’s pasts. The ocean remembers everything, it has been said. That may be so, but it’s up to us beachcombers to bring those memories into the light of day, to recall what has been lost.

There are other messages in bottles waiting to be found right now that contain Christmas memories, and there will be more in the future. Here’s hoping we will find them and return these priceless memories to their rightful owners.

What a gift that would be, at any time of year.

This article appeared in Beachcombing Magazine Volume 51 November/December 2025.