In retaliation for excommunication, the Reds decided to abolish Christmas.  And so on Christmas Eve Peppone came out of the People's Palace without so much as a glance at Bigio, who was waiting for him at the door, and hurried home, avoiding the main square in order not to run into the crowd returning from Midnight Mass.  Smilzo trailed after him in disciplined style, but got no reward for his pains, because Peppone slammed the door of his own house behind him without so much as a good-night.  He was dead tired and lost no time in falling into bed.

"Is that you?" asked his wife.

"Yes," mumbled Peppone.  "Who do you expect it to be?"

"There's no telling," she retorted.  "With the new principles you've just announced, it might just as well be some other official of your Party."

"Don't be silly," said Peppone.  "I'm not in a joking mood."

"Neither am I, after this very uninspiring Christmas Eve.  You wouldn't even look at the letter your son had left under your plate.  And when he stood up on a chair to recite the Christmas poem he learned in school you ran away.  What have children to do with politics, anyhow?"

"Let me sleep, will you?" shouted Peppone, rolling over and over.

She stopped talking, but it took Peppone a long time to fall asleep.  Even after he finally dozed off, he found no peace, for nightmares assailed him, the kind of nightmares that go with indigestion or worry.  He woke up while it was still dark, jumped out of bed and got dressed without putting on the light.

He went down to the kitchen to heat some milk and found the table set just the way it was the evening before.   The soup bowl was still there and he lifted it up to look for the little boy's letter, but it was gone.  He looked at the spotted tablecloth and the scraps of food upon it, remembering how his wife once decorated the table on past Christmas Eves.  This led him to think of other Christmases, when he was a boy, and of his father and mother.

Suddenly he had a vivid memory of Christmas 1944, which he had spent in the mountains, crouching in a cave in danger of being machine-gunned from one moment to the next.  That was a terrible Christmas, indeed, and yet it wasn't so bad as this one because he had thought all day of the good things that went with a peacetime celebration, and the mere thought had warmed the cockles of his heart.

Now there was no danger, and everything was going smoothly.  His wife and children were there right in the next room, and he had only to open the door in order to hear their quiet breathing.  But his heart was icy cold at the thought that the festive table would be just as melancholy on Christmas Day as it had been the evening before.

"And yet that's all there is to Christmas," he said to himself.  "It's just a matter of shiny glasses, snow-white napkins, roast capons and rich desserts."

Then he thought again of Lungo's little boy, who had built a clandestine Manger in the attic of the People's Palace.  And of the letter and poem of his own little boy, which had no connection with all the foodstuffs he had insisted were the only true symbols of the season.

It was starting to grow light as Peppone walked in his long black cape from his own house to the People's Palace.   Lungo was already up and busy sweeping the assembly room.  Peppone was amazed to find him at the door.

"Are you at work this early?"

"It's seven o'clock," Lungo explained.  "On ordinary days, I start at eight, but today isn't ordinary."

Peppone went to his desk and started looking over the mail.  There were only a dozen routine letters, and within a few minutes his job was done.

"Nothing important, Chief?" asked Lungo, sticking his head around the door.

"Nothing at all," said Peppone.  "You can take care of them yourself."

Lungo picked up the letters and went away, but he came back soon after with a sheet of paper in his hands.

"This is important, Chief," he said.  "It must have escaped your notice."

Peppone took the letter, looked at it and handed it back.

"Oh, I saw that," he said; "there's nothing unusual about it."

"But it's a matter of Party membership and you really ought to make an immediate reply."

"Some other day," mumbled Peppone.  "This is Christmas."

Lungo gave him a stare which Peppone didn't like.  He got up and stood squarely in front of his subordinate.

"I said it's Christmas, did you understand?"

"No, I didn't," said Lungo, shaking his head.

"Then I'll explain," said Peppone, giving him a monumental slap in the face.

Lungo made the mistake of continuing to play dumb, and because he was a strapping fellow, even bigger than Peppone, he gave him back a dose of the same medicine.  With which Peppone charged like an armored division, knocked him on to the floor and proceeded to change the complexion of his hindquarters with a series of swift kicks.  When he had done a thorough job, he grabbed Lungo by the lapels and asked him:

"Did you understand what I was saying?"

"I get it; today's Christmas," said Lungo darkly.

Peppone stared at the little manger Lungo's son had built.

"What does it matter if some people choose to believe that a carpenter's son, born two thousand years ago, went out to preach the equality of all men and to defend the poor against the rich, only to be crucified by the age-old enemies of justice and liberty?"

"That doesn't matter at all," said Lungo, shaking his head.   "The trouble is some people insist he was the son of God.  That's the ugly part of it."

"Ugly?" exclaimed Peppone.  "I think it's beautiful, if you want to know.  The fact that God chose a carpenter and not a rich man for a father shows that He is deeply democratic."

Lungo sighed.  "Too bad the priests are mixed up in it,"  he said.  "Otherwise we could take it over."

"Exactly!  Now you've hit the real point!  We must keep our heads and not mix up things that have no real connection.  God is one thing and priests are another.  And the danger comes not from God but from the priests.   They're what we must seek to eliminate.  It's the same thing with the rich people's money.  We must eliminate them and spread their money among the poor."

Lungo's political education had not gone so far, and once more he shook his head uncomprehendingly.

"That isn't the essential question.  The fact is that God doesn't exist; he's merely a priests' invention.  The only things that really exist are those that we can see and touch for ourselves.  All the rest is sheer fancy."

Peppone didn't seem to put much stock in Lungo's cerebrations, for he answered:

"If a man's born blind, how is he to know that red, green, and the other colors exist, since he can't see them?  Suppose all of us were to be born blind; then within a hundred years all belief in the existence of color would be lost.   And yet you and I can vouch for it.  Isn't it possible that God exists and we are blind men who on the basis of reason or experience alone can't understand His existence?"

Lungo was completely baffled.

"Never mind," said Peppone abruptly.  "This isn't a problem that requires immediate solution.  Forget about it."

~~~

Peppone was on his way home when he ran into Don Camillo.   "What can I do for Your Grey Eminence?" he asked gloomily.

"I wanted to offer you my best wishes for Christmas and the New Year," said Don Camillo blandly.

"You forget that we Reds have been excommunicated," said Peppone.  "That makes your good wishes somewhat illogical."

"No more illogical than the care which a doctor gives a sick man.   He may quarantine him in order to protect others from his contagious disease, but he continues to look after him.  We abhor not the sinner but the sin."

"That's a good one!" said Peppone.  "You talk of love, but you'd kill us off without hesitation."

"No, we'd be very poor doctors of men's souls if we killed them in order to obtain a cure.  Our love is directed at their healing."

"And what about the violent cure you spoke of at the political rally the other day?"

"That had nothing to do with you and your friends," Don Camillo answered calmly.  "Take typhus for instance.  There are three elements involved.  The typhus itself, the lice that carry it and the suffering patient.  In order to overcome the disease we must care for the patient and kill the lice.  It would be idiotic to care for the lice and insane to imagine that they could be transformed into something other than a vehicle of contagion.  And in this case, Peppone, you are the sick man, not the louse."

"I'm perfectly well, thank you, Father.  You're the sick one, sick in the head."

"Anyhow, my Christmas wishes come not from the head but from the heart; you can accept them without reservation."

"No," said Peppone, "head, heart or liver, it's all the same.  That's like saying: 'Here's a nice little bullet for you; it's a gift not from the percussion cap but from the barrel.'"

Don Camillo threw out his arms in discouragement.

"God will take pity on you," he murmured.

"That may be, but I doubt that He'll take pity on you.  Come the revolution, he won't prevent your hanging from that pole.  Do you see it?"

Of course Don Camillo saw the flagpole.  The People's Palace was on the right side of the square and from his study window he couldn't help seeing the pole sticking insolently up into the free air, with a shiny metal hammer and sickle at its summit.  This was quite enough to ruin the view.

"Don't you think I might be a bit too heavy for your pole?" he asked Peppone.  "Hadn't you better import some gallows from Prague?  Or are those reserved for Party comrades?"

Peppone turned his back and went away.  When he reached his own house he called his wife outside.

"I'll be back about one o'clock," he told her.  "Try to fix everything in the usual Christmas way."

"That's already attended to," she mumbled.  "You'd better be back by noon."

Shortly after noon, when he came into the big kitchen, Peppone rediscovered the atmosphere of Christmases gone by and felt as if he were emerging from a nightmare.  The little boy's Christmas letter was under his plate and seemed to him to be unusually well written.  He was ready and eager to hear the Christmas poem, but this did not seem to be forthcoming.  He imagined it would come at the end of the meal and went on eating.  Even when they had finished dinner, however, the child showed no intention of standing up in his chair to recite, in the customary manner.   Peppone looked questioningly at his wife, but she only shrugged her shoulders in reply.  She whispered something in the little boy's ear and then reported to her husband:

"Nothing doing.  He won't say it."

Peppone had a secret weapon: a box of chocolates which he extracted from his pocket with the announcement: "If someone recites a poem, this is his reward!"

The child look anxiously at the chocolates but continued to shake his head.  His mother parlayed with him again but brought back the same negative reply.   At this point Peppone lost patience.

"If you won't recite the poem, it means you don't know it!" he said angrily.

"I know it, all right," the child answered, "but it can't be recited now."

"Why not?" Peppone shouted.

"Because it's too late.  The Baby Jesus is born now, and the poem is about the time just before."

Peppone called for the notebook and found that, sure enough, the poem was all in the future tense.  At midnight the stall in Bethlehem would be lit up, the Infant would be born and the shepherds would come to greet Him.

"But a poem's not like an advertisement in the paper," said Peppone.  "Even if it's a day old it's as good as it was to start with."

"No," the child insisted, "if Baby Jesus was born last night, we can't talk about him as going to be born tomorrow."

His mother urged him again, but he would not give in.

In the afternoon, Peppone took the little boy for a walk and when they were far from home he made one more attempt to bring him around.

"Now that we're all alone, can't you recite the poem?"

"No."

"No one will hear you."

"But Baby Jesus will know."

This sentence was a poem itself, and Peppone appreciated it.

~~~

The allotted number of days went by and then New Year's Eve arrived in the village.  In the little world as everywhere else it was the custom to welcome the New Year with lots of noise.  The irrepressible high spirits of the villagers found this an excellent excuse for letting go with every available firearm at midnight.  So the New Year was started off right and the dying year killed off for good and all.   Don Camillo had a hundred good reasons for disliking this custom, but this year he felt a perverse desire to kill the old year and have done with it.  A few minutes before midnight he opened his study window and stood there, gun in hand, waiting for the bell in the church tower to ring.  The lights were out but there was a fire in the fireplace and when Thunder, his dog, caught the gleam of the gun in Don Camillo's hand he was highly excited.

"Quiet there," Don Camillo explained.  "This isn't my shooting gun.  It's the old firing-piece I keep in the attic.  It's a matter of shooting the old year out, and a shotgun won't answer the purpose."

The square was empty and the lamp in front of the People's Palace lit up the flagpole.

"It's almost as conspicuous by night as it is by day," muttered Don Camillo.  "Seems as if they put it there just to annoy me."

The first of the twelve peals of midnight sounded, and at once the shooting began.  Don Camillo leaned on the window-sill calmly and fired a single shot.  Just one, because the gesture was a symbolic one and this was quite sufficient to give it meaning.  It was very cold.  Don Camillo carefully shut the window, leaned the gun against a chest and stirred the fire.  All of a sudden he realized that Thunder wasn't there.  Obviously he was so excited over the shooting that he had run out to join the fun.  The priest was not particularly worried.  The dog would slip back in just as easily as he had slipped out a few minutes before.  Soon after this the door creaked and he looked up expectantly.  The cause was not Thunder but Peppone.

"Excuse me," he said, "but the door was ajar and I came to pay you a call."

"Thank you, my son.  It's always pleasant to be remembered."

"Father," said Peppone, sitting down beside him.   "There's no doubt about it, truth is stranger than fiction."

"Has something unfortunate happened?" asked Don Camillo.

"No, just a curious coincidence.  Someone shooting into the air hit our flagpole just at the top, where the metal emblem is joined on to the wood.   Don't you find that extraordinary?"

"Extraordinary, indeed," Don Camillo agreed, throwing out his arms.

"And that's not all," Peppone continued.  "In its fall the emblem very nearly hit Lungo on the head.  He though someone had thrown something at him on purpose and gave the alarm.  We all went out to look, and although there was nothing on the ground we noticed when we looked up that the emblem was missing from the flagpole and that, as I told you, it had been clipped off very neatly.   Now who do you think can have taken it away as a trophy from the deserted square?"

"To be quite frank," said Don Camillo, "I can't imagine who would be interested in a piece of junk of that kind."

Meanwhile, Thunder had come back and sat motionless between the two men.   The hammer-and-sickle emblem was between his teeth and at a certain point he dropped it on to the floor.  Don Camillo picked it up and turned it around in his hand.

"A poor quality of metal," he said.  "From a distance it didn't look so frail.  Take it home if it interests you."

Peppone looked at the emblem which Don Camillo was holding out to him and then looked into the fire.  Since no hand was extended to take it, the priest threw it into the flames.  Peppone gritted his teeth but said nothing.  The emblem grew red and hot, its joints melted and the various parts curled up like so many snakes.

"If Hell wasn't just an invention of us priests ... " Don Camillo murmured.

"It's the other way around," muttered Peppone.   "Priests are an invention of Hell!"

While the priest poked at the fire Peppone went to look out the window.   Through the glass he could see the decapitated flagpole.

"How many shots did it take you?" he asked without turning around.

"One."

"American model with telescope attachment?"

"No, a regular old ninety-one."

Peppone came to sit down again by the fire.

"Still a good gun," he mumbled.

"Guns are ugly things at best," murmured Don Camillo.

"Happy New Year!" muttered Peppone as he went out the door.

"Thanks, and the same to you," Don Camillo answered.

"I was speaking to Thunder," said Peppone roughly.

And Thunder, who was stretched out in front of the fire, responded to the mention of his name by wagging his tail.