With Halloween in the rearview mirror we are heading full steam ahead towards the holidays.  Someone told me just recently that they view Thanksgiving as the first Christmas celebration.  Doesn’t it feel that way sometimes?  The stores are already glimmering and shimmering with Christmas bling, encouraging us to shop early and beat the rush!  I sheepishly admit that I did cave into the pressure and bought the first presents of the year but I at least waited until Nov. 1.  As I look ahead to the Christmas season, I can feel one of two ways.  Tired already from thinking about the pressures of creating a storybook Christmas that will be remembered though family history as the best Christmas ever, or I can chuck all of what society tells me I need to make my holidays “merry and bright” and return to the basics, remember what is truly important, and not lose myself in the frantic, over-the-top, Christmas production.  I know that this is super early to even begin thinking along these lines but I wanted to be able to take a minute and encourage you while your mind is still relatively holiday-fog free.  When you feel yourself beginning to feel buried in Christmas, take a deep breath, remember this story and ask yourself, “What would Wally the inn-keeper do?”

For years now whenever Christmas pageants are talked about in a certain little town in the Midwest, someone is sure to mention the name of Wallace Purling. Wally’s performance in one annual production of the Nativity play has slipped into the realm of legend. But the old-timers who were in the audience that night never tire of recalling exactly what happened.

Wally was 9 that year and in the second grade, though he should have been in the fourth. Most people in town knew that he had difficulty in keeping up. He was big and clumsy, slow in movement and mind. Still, Wally was well liked by the other children in his class, all of whom were smaller than he, though the boys had trouble hiding their irritation when the uncoordinated Wally would ask to play ball with them.

Most often they’d find a way to keep him off the field, but Wally would hang around anyway—not sulking, just hoping. He was always a helpful boy, a willing and smiling one, and the natural protector, paradoxically, of the underdog. Sometimes if the older boys chased the younger ones away, it would always be Wally who’d say, ‘Can’t they stay? They’re no bother.’

Wally fancied the idea of being in the Christmas pageant that year [as] a shepherd with a flute, but the play’s director, Miss Lumbard, assigned him to a more important role. After all, she reasoned, the Innkeeper did not have too many lines, and Wally’s size would make his refusal of lodging to Joseph more forceful.

And so it happened that the usual large, partisan audience gathered for the town’s Yuletide extravaganza of the crooks and crèches, of beards, crowns, halos, and a whole stage full of squeaky voices. No one on stage or off was more caught up in the magic of the night than Wallace Purling. They said later that he stood in the wings and watched the performance with such fascination that from time to time Miss Lumbard had to make sure he didn’t wander onstage before his cue.

Then the time came when Joseph appeared, slowly, tenderly guiding Mary to the door of the inn. Joseph knocked hard on the wooden door set into the painted backdrop. Wally the Innkeeper was there, waiting.

“’What do you want?’ Wally said, swinging the door open with a brusque gesture.

“’We seek lodging.”

“’Seek it elsewhere,” Wally looked straight ahead but spoke vigorously. “The inn is filled.”

“’Sir, we have asked everywhere in vain. We have traveled far and are very weary.”

“’There is no room in this inn for you.” Wally looked properly stern.

“’Please, good innkeeper, this is my wife, Mary. She is heavy with child and needs a place to rest. Surely you must have some small corner for her. She is so tired.”

Now for the first time, the Innkeeper relaxed his stiff stance and looked down at Mary. With that, there was a long pause, long enough to make the audience a bit tense with embarrassment.

[Finally] the prompter whispered from the wings, [‘Wally, your line, it’s,] “No! Begone!”’

[And] Wally repeated automatically, “No! Begone!’”

[So] Joseph sadly placed his arm around Mary, and Mary laid her head upon her husband’s shoulder and the two of them started to move away. The Innkeeper, however, did not return inside his inn. Wally stood there in the doorway, watching the forlorn couple. His mouth was open, his brow creased with concern, his eyes filling unmistakably with tears.

And suddenly this Christmas pageant became different from all others.

“’Don’t go, Joseph,” Wally called out. “Bring Mary back.” And Wallace Purling’s face grew into a bright smile. “You can have my room.’”

Some people in town thought that the pageant had been ruined. Yet there were others—many, many others—who considered it the most Christmas of all Christmas pageants they had ever seen.

“You can have my room.”  In those words, we hear the love of Christ being born anew in the heart of a young boy, who had discovered the wonder of Christmas.  That instead of being caught up in the frenzy of the upcoming season we could instead become such a part of the story that we would offer Jesus room in our hearts, room in our homes, and rediscover the true wonder of the Christmas season.

**The story of Wallace Purling is from Dina Donahue’s Christmas story “Trouble at the Inn”