Text: Luke 2:12 - "And this will be a sign for you: you will find a babe wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger."

The night was bitter cold. Little Nanuska couldn’t sleep because she was cold and she had never slept in a hayloft before. She desperately missed her warm comfortable bed back in the East Zone. The smell of the cattle below the hayloft almost turned her stomach and, when the cows let out a bellow, she became scared.

Oh, why, oh, why, had her father been so set in his ways? It all seemed so senseless to make such a great big fuss over such a thing as confirmation. All of her playmates had given up the church and had taken the Youth Pledge of the Communist Party. Her father and mother both said they would rather die than forsake God and bow down before a godless Stat…