Joseph and Mary hitchhiked toward Memphis, riding shotgun in a semi-truck.

The truck driver kept looking at Joseph with a distrusting look. Probably because Joseph dressed like a thug. Joseph’s Snoop Dogg T-shirt and tats weren’t helping, either.

The driver let them off at Walmart. The teenage boy helped his girlfriend out of the cab. She was lovely and quiet. Tatted up. And pregnant as could be.

The driver offered Joseph cash. Joseph refused, but the driver insisted.

“Take it,” the driver said. “Your girl needs a coat, it’s below freezing tonight.”

He took the cash, namely because he had no choice. The teenage couple had left home in a hurry. Mary’s dad kicked her out. They were living with Joseph’s parents, but his mother despised Mary. “That girl is just using you,” his mother would say.

So here they were in Walmart.

They walked inside the Supercenter. The women’s section didn’t have maternity jackets, so they bought a men’s work coat, double-X, brown, with all the charm of livestock excrement.

“Aren’t you going to buy yourself a coat?” Mary asked.

“I’m okay,” Joseph said.

“But all you’re wearing is a T-shirt.”

Joseph’s scrawny bare arms poked from beneath the sleeves of his Snoop-Dogg shirt. He had no body fat on his tiny frame.

Joseph’s clothes hung off him like a revival tent. He had been working as a commercial framer ever since quitting school during eighth grade. Construction work makes you lean. So does a steady diet of Marlboros and Monster Energy drinks.

They left Walmart, walking a vacant highway shoulder, looking for a place to crash. A Super 8, a Red Roof Inn, maybe a Motel 6. But they found nothing.

Then.

Mary stopped walking. She clutched her belly.

“What’s wrong?” said Joseph.

Mary’s pants were soaked. There was an instant puddle around her feet. “I think I’m having the baby.”

Joseph stuck his thumb out for a ride, but the few cars that passed didn’t even slow down. You never realize how truly indifferent your fellow man can be until you attempt to hitchhike.

They found an abandoned gas station off the rural highway. Plywood on the windows, weeds in the parking lot, old pumps out front. Not a light around for miles.

Joseph tried using his phone to call for help, but there was no service out here. So the teenage boy used a rock to break a gas station window. They let themselves inside.

Inside the old store was a battalion of empty shelves, moldy Coca-Cola coolers, and deceased coffee machines. There was also, evidently, a warren of raccoons living inside. The raccoons scurried away, hissing and growling, expressing the universal sentiment of being genuinely pissed off.

Joseph made Mary a pallet using old beer crates and a dry-rotted blue tarp he found. The floor was soon filled with the bodily fluids and semi-solids of childlabor.

And as his girlfriend was caught in the throes of maternity, Joseph was asking himself, “What the hell am I doing?”

As the teenage girl beared down, veins in her forehead visible beneath translucent skin, Joseph was thinking to himself, “This isn’t even my baby.”

But when the child was born, all self-doubt vanished. All apprehension disappeared when he took the infant into his arms. He wrapped the babe in a swaddling Snoop Dogg T-shirt, and laid him in a Bud Light box.

The whole atmosphere was electric with the joy that follows birth. The air itself seemed to hum, almost as though the universe were singing.

And the young man realized that he had never felt this much love before. Not in all his life. Love washed over him like a hurricane. Love so comprehensive, so outright, so devoid of conditions, that it almost broke him.

It was the same kind of love that, each day, rains down upon mankind. The same love that has kept you alive thus far. The same love that occurred 2024 years ago.

The same love I hope you feel this Christmas morning.