When I was a child my mother would buy a big Christmas tree every December and we’d all decorate it with baubles, tinsel and fairy lights.
One Christmas eve, aged fourteen years old, I took a walk outside in the misty London streets. It was so late that there was almost no traffic. On the night before Christmas, the city seemed finally to be resting.
The house was quiet when I returned, and as I sat down in the living room and gazed over at the shining Christmas tree, something completely out of the ordinary happened.
A door opened inside me to an astonishing state of being that held me riveted for a long, long time. A state of reverence, awe and magic had spontaneously arisen inside me. It were as if those fairy lights had evoked the sacred inner light. In the years since that night I have become a seeker, and lately a lover, of that radiance.
And here we are again in yet another December, and as I approach the latest Christmas of my life there is, as always, a tone of sadness about what Christmas has become. Here in Britain, as in many places, what was once a celebration of light seems to have become mostly about eating, drinking and shopping.
When my kids were young, my wife and I tried to do things differently. Every year we’d retell the advent story with home-made felt puppets. We’d bake things, make things, sing lots of carols and tone down the presents.
This was the period in their lives when I would tell them a new story each night at bedtime, and one December night this one came through. Listening to it again now draws me back to that moment of awe and wonder that I had in my youth.
Once there was a bus driver whose bus was always full of passengers. It only got worse at Christmas, when people would clamber on with their huge bags of shopping. Sometimes there was barely standing room.
One cold December morning, however, something very strange happened: the streets were all deserted.
There was no traffic, and nobody was waiting at the bus stops for him. A thick mist hung in the air and everything seemed strangely dream-like.
“Where is everyone?” he wondered as he drove through the empty streets past one empty bus stop after another.
Finally, however, he saw a passenger waiting in the mist. “At last!” he said.
But as he approached him, he found that this was a most unusual passenger. He was a young man with long dark hair, dressed in a white robe and sandals. He looked vaguely familar, but the driver couldn’t place him.
The young man took a seat near the front and as he drove on something magical came over the bus driver: a sense of calm, of deep peace, and the most wonderful sense of purpose. It felt to him that this was the best thing he’d ever done in his life, driving this strange young man through the deserted streets. Indeed, it felt like this was what he had been born to do.
When the young man got off at his stop, the driver said, “excuse me, but do you have any idea why there’s nobody around?”
The young man smiled, “because it’s my birthday!” he said, and walked off into the mist.
“Your birthday?” spluttered the bus driver, and then he looked at the calendar that hung next to his seat. “Then… you must be Jesus!”
The bus driver ran out into the mist, shouting for him. But he was nowhere to be seen.
Returning to his bus, however, he found a small present on the seat where the young man had been sitting.
He went home, made himself some Christmas dinner, and then opened his little present.
Inside was a little golden bus, an exact replica of the one that he had driven that day. The driver looked very much like himself, he thought.
When he went back to work, he took that little golden bus with him in his pocket, and from that day forth, everything was different. A deep peace filled him, and a deep sense of purpose too. Every passenger seemed special to him, no matter how full the bus was.
In time he came to bless the day he had driven his empty bus through the mist on Christmas day…
I wish Christmas could always be a time of spaciousness and magic; of creating enough space on the bus that the inner light could return to us and remind us of the deeper purpose of our lives.
You can find the story here: A Christmas Story
And if you are all shopped-out but are still stuck for presents for someone small, you can find 100 more stories on Palace of Stories!
