I'll go ahead and say it: 'Christmas'

Warning: If you are politically correct, please skip this column.

This is a story about Christmas.

I figure it's OK for me to actually write that word Christmas since it is, indeed, Christmas Eve and tomorrow is actually Christmas Day. For the past two months (or more), retailers, advertisers, employers, elected officials, bureaucrats, educators, yours and my co-workers, most of the media and millions of other pedestrians have been petrified that they might offend a stranger by the use of the one word that accurately describes what it is will be observed and celebrated tomorrow.

C-h-r-i-s-t-m-a-s.

Back in the last century, when politics and correctness were still strangers, the Christmas film "Miracle on 34th Street" was released. My wife and I watch it every year, but when we watched it during this season of high righteousness, we were struck by a few scenes that would be struck down by the PC police circa 2007.

For example, the movie depicts a sloppy-drunk Santa fired by Macy's in front of spectators and co-workers at the big Thanksgiving Day parade. Today, Santa would be diagnosed as ill, immediately whisked into therapy and then file a lawsuit against the store for wrongful termination.

The sober Santa who replaces him is obese by today's measurements and certainly would be criticized for encouraging the portliness of the nation's youth (although, I have yet to meet a teenager who wants to grow up to become Santa Claus).

A store psychologist does exhibit some early political correctness when he says that Santa should be committed to a "mental institution" at a time when there were still insane asylums.

In the film we see:

• Santa encouraging senseless aggression by using his cane as a weapon.

_ A little girl chewing gum while in bed, risking tooth decay and choking.

_ One character smoking before bed in a room with a nonsmoker.

• A husband committing domestic cruelty by feeding his wife "triple strength martinis" to pickle her judgment.

• And then, in one horrifying bit of dialogue, he exclaims that the cocktails have made her "gay."

Further, except for one white woman, the department store executives are all white men. There is a black woman in the film -- working as a maid on Thanksgiving.

That brings me to a very politically incorrect story that has stuck with my wife since she was growing up in Downers Grove. It was a Christmastime parable that Joel Daly read on Channel 7 when he was anchoring the news 35 or 40 years ago. You wouldn't hear it today.

The story was about a man who didn't believe in Christmas.

He couldn't accept the concept of an all-mighty, all-powerful God sending his son to Earth in the form of a man.

So, as another Christmas Eve arrived, the man did what he did every year -- he went out to a party. He arrived back home about 11:30 that night and it was snowing heavily when he went to bed.

All of a sudden there was a loud thump! He paused for a moment and then heard it again: thump! Something was hitting the large plate-glass window facing out to his front yard.

Thinking that there might be some teenagers throwing snowballs, the man rushed outside. There were no kids. It was a flock of birds … one by one, slamming into his picture window. Thump! thump! -- sparrows hitting the glass so hard that they fell dead to the ground below.

The man realized that the little birds were confused and frightened by the heavy, swirling snow. They could see inside his house to a place of light and shelter, and they were trying to get inside. But what they could never know was that no matter how hard they tried, they would never be able to get in through the glass.

Thump! Thump! Thump! Three more sparrows slammed into the glass and fell lifeless to the ground.

The man quickly ran back inside and turned off all the lights, thinking that if the birds couldn't see inside they would stop killing themselves trying to get in. But the birds continued to fly into the glass.

Then he started shouting at the flock, but that didn't work either.

Helpless, the man stood there in the snowy cold and darkness, watching the sparrows die, one by one. With tears icing on his face he thought, "If only I could be a bird for just a few minutes ... I could talk to them in their own language. They wouldn't be afraid of me; they would understand me, and I could tell them what they needed to do to save themselves."

At that very moment, it was midnight and church bells throughout the town were ringing to usher in Christmas morning

The man stood there considering what had happened and the words that he had just said to himself.

Suddenly, he understood.

God's plan to be one of us, for just a little while, didn't seem so far-fetched after all.