Instead, they scattered in every direction, except into the warm, lighted barn.Īnd then, he realized, that they were afraid of him. He tried shooing them into the barn by walking around them waving his arms. But to his dismay, the birds ignored the bread crumbs, and continued to flap around helplessly in the snow. So he hurried back to the house, fetched bread crumbs, sprinkled them on the snow, making a trail to the yellow-lighted wide open doorway of the stable. He opened the doors wide and turned on a light, but the birds did not come in. Quickly he put on a coat, galoshes, tramped through the deepening snow to the barn. That would provide a warm shelter, if he could direct the birds to it. Well, he couldn’t let the poor creatures lie there and freeze, so he remembered the barn where his children stabled their pony. They’d been caught in the storm and, in a desperate search for shelter, had tried to fly through his large landscape window. But when he went to the front door to investigate he found a flock of birds huddled miserably in the snow. At first he thought someone must be throwing snowballs against his living room window. Minutes later he was startled by a thudding sound. He went to the window to watch the flurries getting heavier and heavier and then went back to his fireside chair and began to read his newspaper. Shortly after the family drove away in the car, snow began to fall. And so he stayed and they went to the midnight service. That he’d much rather just stay at home, but that he would wait up for them. “I’m truly sorry to distress you,” he told his wife, “but I’m not going with you to church this Christmas Eve.” He said he’d feel like a hypocrite.
![the story about a man trying to rescue birds at christmas the story about a man trying to rescue birds at christmas](https://joshuatreemugco.com/images/products/feed/Yellow-Flower-Hummingbird-Pillow_NB.jpg)
He just couldn’t swallow the Jesus Story, about God coming to Earth as a man. It just didn’t make sense and he was too honest to pretend otherwise. But he just didn’t believe all that incarnation stuff which the churches proclaim at Christmas Time. Generous to his family, upright in his dealings with other men. Now the man to whom I’m going to introduce you was not a scrooge, he was a kind, decent, mostly good man. So for the cynics and the skeptics and the unconvinced I submit a modern parable. You know, THE Christmas Story, the God born a man in a manger and all that escapes some moderns, mostly, I think, because they seek complex answers to their questions and this one is so utterly simple. Unable to trace its proper parentage, I have designated this as my Christmas Story of the Man and the Birds. PAUL HARVEY’S CHRISTMAS STORY “THE MAN AND THE BIRDS”