“All right, this is ridiculous!” A middle-aged woman in a neat business suit with Joanna haphazardly scrawled on her nametag wove her way to the front of the murmuring crowd. “None of us understands any more than the rest about why or how we’re here. But quite obviously, we’ve been given a task, and most likely, we won’t receive any answers until we complete it.” She motioned almost unnecessarily to the large sign on the endmost door that most of the group had approached to study at least once in their otherwise confused milling. “You.” She nodded at the teenager nearest the door, whose clothes and hairstyle put him several decades before the current year. “Read it out loud, so we can stop this constant shuffling.”

The boy—Greg, if the much neater lettering on his nametag was to be believed—looked a little startled, but he turned without argument and read the instruction in a clear voice that carried easily to the end of the greenery-draped hall.

“Find the thread that connects all of your stories.”

The group of strangers eyed each other searchingly, some gazes open and curious, others calculating and wary.

“So.” Joanna clapped once to command everyone’s attention again. “Does anyone have a suggestion for how we go about finding the connecting thread?”

After a few seconds, a girl with the label Ellen, whose plain blouse, split skirt, and high boots gave her the appearance of having just walked off a western movie set, cleared her throat.

“I think it’s pretty easy to see we don’t all come from the same place.”

Several faces broke into smiles at this observation, and a few sets of stiff shoulders relaxed.

“Maybe we should start from that end.” A watchful young man tagged as David, who seemed to have appointed himself guardian of the fragile girl in the wheelchair marked with Kris, spoke up for the first time. “Name what else we’re sure we don’t have in common, and then maybe we’ll see more clearly what’s left.”

“Well, for sure the thread ain’t age.” A young man in dusty, travel-stained clothes and a battered cowboy hat, wearing a hastily scrawled Henry on his tag, motioned to the alert and watchful white-haired man marked Charles, who sat next to him on the room’s one small bench.

“I doubt very much that it’s our station or—circumstances.” The woman with Vida pinned over a lace-trimmed Edwardian-style dress gave an somewhat apologetic glance at the man across from her, whose label of Kane was the only thing about him not range-worn and bearing a rather strong scent of sheep.

“It’s…definitely not our gender?” The young woman tagged Kayla spoke for the first time, then blushed cherry red as several eyes turned toward her. “Sorry—way too obvious.”

“No more than anyone else has been.” A young man wearing a badge marked Donnie, who appeared a few years older and about a decade earlier than Greg, shot her an encouraging smile and shrug, and Kayla hesitantly returned the grin.

“It’s not our race,” came softly from a Hispanic woman with a faint Carmen on her tag.

“Not even our era of history.” The teen marked Lexi eyed the dress of the girl sloppily labeled Betty, who stood next to her. “Forties?”

“Yes, but I wouldn’t even begin to guess yours.”

“Wouldn’t expect you to.” Lexi laughed. “But I don’t see how this is actually helping us. What do we have in common, if not for all those things?”

“We’re all human?” A young black boy with Jayson stuck to his chest lifted his hands in a helpless gesture, and the rest of the company went silent a moment, as if waiting for a signal.

“Well, yes, we’re certainly that.” The young woman with Ida pinned neatly to her old-fashioned nurse’s uniform offered him a smile. “But it seems that isn’t the answer we were looking for. There must be something more that connects us.”

“Does it, though?” A modern girl about her age with Tasha pinned to her sweater cocked her head thoughtfully. “Maybe we’re looking at it all wrong. Did the note say the thread connected us? Or was it our stories?”

There was a stir among the group, and then Greg’s voice rang out again.

“No, she’s right! It does say our stories. But—what stories? It can’t mean to comb back through our whole lives!”

“Perhaps if we all take the last meaningful thing that happened, or the last lesson we learned?” A young woman with Jane pinned to her plain dress, the bloom of girlhood still on her cheeks, and the advent of motherhood evident in her figure spoke softly, and her companions slowly took on varying attitudes of thoughtfulness.

“Well?” Joanne roused the group after a few moments of contemplation. “Someone give us a starting point. What themes have sprung to your mind? The rest of us can say whether they ring true for our own lives.”

“Accidents?” A teen girl marked Layla surveyed the group with interested eyes. Several heads nodded, but others shook, and she stepped back with a shrug.

“Family?” The stylish young woman with Samantha on her coat offered the next suggestion, and a chorus of “yes” seemed poised to confirm the answer, until a timid girl with a worn dress, calloused fingers, and a tag of Blanche mustered the courage to shake her head.

“I’m sorry, no. It’s been years since…” She trailed off with a painful swallow, and her neighbor stepped into the breach with a kind smile.

“Children?” She fingered the scribbled Kelsey on her badge as she waited the result, but even more heads were shaken this time. All eyes turned to the girl next to her, who looked as though she’d rather disappear into the wall than answer. Kelsey and Tasha both opened their mouths as though preparing to cover for her when she surprised everyone by blurting “strangers?” before retreating further into the collar of her coat and the attached label, which read Tess.

More heads were shaken this time, and a boy in a school sweater more than a century old and bearing the name of Ned proposed “friendship.” This idea was pounced on eagerly by many, and others were still considering hesitantly but looked like they might be swayed when Henry spoke up from the bench again.

“I don’t see how I could fit my story to that—’less you count my horse, which I reckon most wouldn’t.”

A collective groan rose from several quarters, but no one suggested that the horse be included, and looks of resignation and despair were settling on a number of faces when Kris laid a feeble hand on David’s. He leaned down to listen, then straightened with a sudden joyous light in his eye.

“She wants to know if the thread could be Christmas. I know it could for me. What about the rest of you?”

There were gasps, cries of delight, and exclamations of relief from all sides, until the collective gaze came to rest on an older man who had remained silent through the whole ordeal and whose suit pocket seemed to have swallowed his name, leaving only the word Professor visible. His eyes narrowed, and his frown deepened as the room held its breath, but finally he burst out with a deep sigh.

“Christmas. Of course it’s Christmas! Of all things in the world, it had to be Christmas!”

A door farther down the hallway popped open, revealing a smaller hallway with multiple doors opening off of it, and the entire group rushed for it as though chasing a Christmas goose, though in the spirit of the season, several held back to let Jane and Kris enter ahead of them.

When the door closed behind the last of them, the author poked her head out of her office and took the sign from her door, then smiled in the direction of the screen where the audience watched.

“Of course it was Christmas. And if you’re utterly confused by who all of these people were, you should pick up a copy of Glad Tidings, my flash-fiction Advent calendar that’s just turned two years old. As you can see, it’s packed with all kinds of settings, themes, and characters, but the one thread that centers it is Christmas—and the reason we celebrate. If you celebrate it yourself, I hope you have a merry Christmas, and if you don’t, I hope you pause and think about the miracle of the Incarnation and what it means, in your own time and your own way. God bless, and I’ll see you next year!”

She lifted the remote, and the decked hall faded as the screen went black.

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