The Worst Noel

By Phillip T Stephens

Lucifer sends the only innocent soul in hell to save a small town church in Bedford Falls and its century-old Christmas pageant. But Pilgrim knows that if Lucifer wants the church saved, it can’t be good. When a televangelist declares on FOX News that ground zero for the War on Christmas is Bedford Falls the church becomes national news.

Pilgrim befriends Elwood Wilson, descendent of the late Elwood P. Dowd, and George Bailey jr, the church's pastor, to save the church. But they face what seems to be a losing battle against televangelists, megachurches and even the Governor of Texas, who have decided that the only thing to stop Chrismageddon is a Hallelujahpaloozah with rock bands and an all-star cast on national TV.

A holiday novelette from the author of Raising Hell in the tradition It's a Wonderful Life. Only this devil will never earn his horns.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Phillip T Stephens
• Release date: Jun 21, 2015
• ISBN: 9780985828516

Phillip T Stephens

During my freshman year in high school, the principal called me into his office and said, "I hear you're hanging out with left-leaning radicals looking to undermine my authority and the authority of the teachers and the school." Now anyone who knew me, also knew I was the Baptist preacher's kid and I may have been a smart-ass but this was San Marcos, Texas in 1968. Shit kicker country. A town where we woke up to the sound of roosters and aroma of the stockyards. I wouldn't know a leftist from a hash pipe. I said, "Not really, but if you'll point me to them, I'll be glad to join." Principals have no since of humor and so he took me at my word. He failed to point me toward any leftist companions, but he did assume I wished their association. Nor would I dissuade him of his delusion, for I discovered in that moment the safety of hiding behind false assumptions rather than emerging into the light. You see, my parents, staunch fundamentalists (my father a Baptist minister and my mother a Presbyterian who married a Baptist minister) believed aliens were the devil's deception, like fossils and evolution. What a wonderfully cruel joke the aliens played on them when they left me on their doorstep on Christmas Eve. Alien babies can't be distinguished from humans. My parents had difficulties adjusting to alien adolescence, but they preferred it to demon possession. Nonetheless, the many hours I spent writing human dialogue in an attempt to master human role playing evolved into fiction and made me the writer I am today. I'm still an embarrassment to my parents, but an adopted alien fiction writer is no less an embarrassment than any other fiction writer who can't get a real job. (Phillip and his wife Carol rescue and foster Alien-Siamese hybrids in Austin, Texas hoping to rehome them, implant free, before the invasion. You can find many warm loving hybrids, indistinguishable from earhling kitties at austinsiameserescue.org.)

Book preview

The Worst Noel

By Phillip T. Stephens

Fiction

Literary Fiction

Satire

Humor

©2012

Electronic ISBN: 978-0-9858285-1-6

Too Bright Girls Publications

Austin, TX

[e-mail]

Cover art by Phillip T. Stephens

Too Bright Girls is a family publisher.

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Follow Phillip @stephens_pt

Other titles by Phillip T. Stephens:

Cigerets, Guns & Beer

Raising Hell

For more Raising Hell fun visit gdiMonday’s.

Table of Contents

The hap-happiest rumble of all

O little town of Bedford Falls

Sing, George’s angel

God help us, churlish gentlemen

O holy s__t

No room at the inn

Hark the televangels sing

Chrismageddon

Our cash and checks we bring

What came upon a midnight clear

Lawyers nipping at your nose

Peas on earth and murky mud

About the Author

Also by Phillip T. Stephens

The hap-happiest rumble of all

HE FIRST THREAD pulled in our great unraveling? The announcement that Bedford Falls’ Church of Redemption was being seized in foreclosure just weeks before Christmas. Before the week ended our poor town was mobbed, televised, criticized, ridiculed by a national audience and leveled by the crossfire between ministers, churches, politicians and even the former Governor of Texas. (You know which one.)

Someone decided Bedford Falls would become the Armageddon of the War on Christmas and plenty of would-be soldiers answered the call.

Someone? I should be more specific. Hundreds of thousands of someones with little qualification and questionable taste who clicked a thumbs up icon on YouTube. The video they liked? The War on Christmas Continues, featuring the Bedford Falls Church of Redemption.

You may have missed it, but the War on Christmas was a major source of entertainment early in the 21st century and every year the media fanned the flames of war to drive up ratings. To be fair, it wasn’t so much a war on Christmas as a war over Christmas, but to listen to the salvos and bombshells you would have thought that Christmas and the baby Jesus were on the verge of being wiped out like smallpox.

Truth be told, Christians in America had it better than Christians in any other country. The last Christians to be thrown in jail for being Christians in America died long before the Revolutionary war, and those Christians were actually thrown in jail by other Christians. However, the memory of those injustices were still strong enough to lead to the First Amendment.

If you believed some pundits, however, by the time of our great unraveling Christians could be burned at the stake for saying, Merry Christmas instead of the more generic Happy Holidays.

The one person in the whole world who benefited the most from the war over the Christmas was Lucifer himself. That’s right the Dark Lord, the Tempter, Old Scratch, the Prince of Darkness. And, believe it or not, he had hatched a plan to drag the sleepy town of Bedford Falls into the crossfire.

The bank posted the notice on the second Friday of December, a small public notice at that, stapled to the doors of Bedford Falls’ Church of Redemption, the oldest standing church in the county. The sign was a notice of foreclosure and announced that the premises must be vacated within ten days.

The day started as the best of all possible winter days, which made it the worst possible day for to receive such a notice. The snow fell heavily overnight, covering the gray slush and tire marks in the street, leaving the roads pristine and white. The county snow plows had yet to arrive and, for the most part, people chose to stay in their homes until the sun could melt an inch or two away.

You might think this peculiar given the speed and excessive zeal of the modern city, but Bedford Falls was a different place, still locked in the mystique of of the mid-twentieth century, a time when people would be forgiven for waiting at home with a steaming cup of coffee rather than putting their lives or the lives of others at risk by driving on slippery roads.

Sadly, half the folks in Bedford Falls had no reason to be driving on that beautiful day anyway. They lost their jobs after Bain Capital bought Wainwright industries and shipped their jobs to Thailand. The only people out and about in Bedford Falls that morning were the occasional wanderer and the die hard faithful customers of Belle’s Coffee Shop, The Iron Horse Diner and the my own crowd of friends at the Divine Tap.

And it was a beautiful day. The rare bright sunshine reflected off the snow and ice with little flashes like angels flitting across town. Real Christmas decorations dangled from shop doors and telephone posts–no fiber optics or neon—accented by old fashioned Christmas bulbs, the kind that were painted and as large as Brazil nuts, that blinked red and green, rather than those tiny bright white LED strings that stay up year round. Giant tinsel strands draped intersections. Wreaths adorned every shop door. The town Christmas tree, a real tree, a real fir transplanted next to city hall in 1853 and now more than sixty feet tall, spread its branches like thick plumage, adorned with tinsel, glittered bulbs, nutcrackers, wooden trains, stars, angels and thick mounds of snow the size of fists, as fluffy as cotton candy and still waiting to melt.

Word of the notice reached the faithful who gathered for spirits at the Divine Tap off Main and Fourth within minutes. Bob Stoker saw a bank employee stapling it to the door while wandering over for his daily bump and beer to brace him for his afternoon mail deliveries.

Damn shame, Clark Dunhill said and held up his glass to toast. My parents sent me there for Sunday School every week before rolling over and going back to sleep. To the Church of Redemption.

Here, here, we all said, not really needing an excuse to take another drink, but certainly welcoming the opportunity. God bless the Reverend Bailey, George Jaspers, retired mailman said. Here, here, we all chimed in, especially since the Reverend had been known to join us for a toddy on cold winter afternoons when the heat was out in his office.

The toasts continued for the rest of the afternoon until we were no longer in such low spirits at the prospect of losing the town’s oldest church.

Before nightfall the entire town was in an uproar. Not because the Church of Redemption had a large membership anymore (it didn’t), not because the right Reverend George Bailey III was an influential civic figure (he wasn’t). In fact, most of the church’s members preferred to downplay his reputation for dreadfully dull sermons, his coffee stained collar and a tobacco stained meerschaum pipe that sparked more embers out of the bowl than it kept inside, or his preference for the same jacket, socks and sandals he wore to seminary in the seventies.

Bedford Falls was in an uproar because the Church of Redemption had hosted the town Christmas pageant since 1860, just before the Civil War. No one knew exactly why the pageant tradition started, or why it became so important to the town, but they sure weren’t happy to lose it.

Some of the costumes dated back almost that far, mended and patched so many times that several of the angels looked like Raggedy Ann dolls rejected by the Salvation Army. The reindeer costumes had absorbed so much naphthalene that moths would flee from the back rows and church balcony. The Santa Suit had stars and stripes in Civil War tradition and the pageant still featured an American flag with 34 stars. There were no Disney characters and mommy didn’t kiss Santa Claus. Tradition was tradition, and in Bedford Falls the pageant was the only tradition we had left.

The high school hadn’t won a championship since 1956. It closed in 1985 and the students were shipped to the new high school in Norfolk. Election night parties dwindled in size over the last twenty years, which is as long as the mayor has run unopposed. The annual fall Apple Fest, which used to be our largest tourist attraction, shut down years ago when bigger towns squeezed it out with Pecan Fests,