In the yuletide season of 1931, there was not a great deal to be merry about anywhere on God’s green earth (or God’s brown earth, as the case was in most of the middle of His own blessed America). Folks were starving and broke. There were crazy people in Europe who were not yet turning the sky a human shade of grey, but the time was coming. Oh yes it was.

It was in that cold winter, Christmas Eve if you need to know, that Vernon Kent found himself thrown off a train. The railroad bull had been in a particularly Christian mood that evening, and had proven it by relieving Vernon of the burden of carrying two of his teeth, a kindness the tramp had vowed to repay one fine day, although the bull never heard him, the train had moved on some several hundred feet by then, and it seemed like by God nobody ever heard what Vernon Kent had to say anymore. Times weren’t what they used to.

Vernon was ready to call it the worst, coldest birthday Jesus ever had until he saw that friendly old barn sitting up on the hill….