Every year my Pastor tells this same story at the Christmas eve service at our church so I thought I would pass it on to you as my little gift. I can’t remember all the details but this is the main gist of it.

“It was Christmas eve and a woman began to prepare to attend the evening celebration in the quaint country church in the middle of town. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like to go?” she said to her husband, the atheist.

“No, thank you, dear,” he replied, “I’ll sit here at home and watch through the window while the snow flakes float down  like snow.”

“Maybe just this once you could go with me and sing some carols?” she implored beseechingly while tying her hat under her chin.

“No dear, you go right ahead and enjoy yourself but with all due respect I don’t go in for all that sort of thing, as you know.”

So the wife bid her farewells, leaving in a sort of sad way foreshadowing the events that were no doubt about to transpire.

As for the atheist, he turned his easy chair from in front of the TV  and positioned it before the large window in their living room and settled down to watch the show that little did he know could change his life forever.

The snow flakes fell as the man sat there in a calm and stoic way and in fact they began to fall with greater frequency since it was about to really storm. The violence of the blizzard soon caused the atheist to think about how cold and violent the universe is. “We are like those poor people in the church,” he pondered. “We surround ourselves with warmth and noise in order to forget for a moment the cold dark universe that waits outside the door.”

Just then the church bell began to tone and it reminded him of that depressing verse from “I heard the bells on Christmas day” about “There is no peace on earth, I said.” For, although he was an atheist now, he hadn’t always been one. But years of over-blown celebrations and commercialization and fruitcakes and department store Santas and those corny United Way stamps together with the irreconcilably mixed up birth narratives of St. Matthew and St. Luke and his pastor’s same implausible story told over and over again every Christmas eve had driven from him any vestiges of what you might call Yule tide cheer.

The man was surprised from his reveries by a thump on the window. As he jumped from his chair he saw that a little bird had hit the window and now lay fluttering and sad in the snow. Stunned himself and perplexed he thought he should turn off all the lights so that no more little birdies would whack his window and possibly damage it.

He switched off the light. Returning to his chair he almost sat down when he saw that a flock of little birds was flying around helplessly in the storm in his front yard. They were migratory birds, no doubt, who had lost their way and they in some subtle way awakened a metaphorical message in the man’s brain. “How like us are these little birds swirling around in the dark and the storm while even their best efforts will probably not be enough and they will freeze to death before the night is over.”

At this point he imagined himself running out and opening up the door to the barn to somehow provide refuge to these poor birdies. But such was his confidence in natural selection that he knew that his intervention would be pointless and even somehow an intrusion on the great battle of survival. Or, with a wry smile, he imagined himself turning into a bird and maybe communicating with the birds in bird language and begging them to be saved in the barn. But then of course his brain would be that of a bird and he himself would just end up helplessly flying around in a storm instead of sitting comfortably here in his favorite chair.

Just as he settled back into his chair, he heard the church bell ring again. “Ah,” he thought, “they must be finishing and my wife will soon be home.”

The End.

Thanks for allowing me the chance to share this little story with you. It reminds us all of the true Spirit of Christmas and the Reason behind the Season. Merry Christmas!