The old man stood in the snow banging on our back kitchen door. He had a shovel in his hand. “You have to let me in! I am stuck and I need to call my brother to get me out!” I stood on the other side of the glass door, my two-year-old granddaughter perched on my left hip. I was wearing an apron and had a wooden spoon that I had been using to stir gravy for the roast beef and potatoes in my right hand.

“Who are you? Where did you come from? Where are you stuck?” I screamed back through the glass. “Down there by the woods,” he said, motioning to the slope behind our in-ground pool and pool house and bordering the woods on our 12-acre lot. “What do you mean down by the woods? In a car?” I couldn’t figure out what he meant, although I had some perspective.

Just minutes before, my 21-year-old daughter had come down from her room and said, “I think someone is driving around our front (circular) driveway and they are slipping on the ice. They might have pulled behind the garage,” she said, showing me a video of a white car in front of our house. 

We live on the end of a cul-de-sac. Our ridiculously steep driveway curves from street’s end into our woods and up to our house. In the winter it is treacherous. We pray on our way down, but we know the drill – hug the left (where, years ago, my husband built up a grassy knoll to keep our cars from ending up in the woods in bad weather), put it in low and take it slow. The way back up requires gunning it.

It is hard to imagine why anyone who does not belong here would attempt that driveway on a snowy winter day. And on this early January 2025 day we had four to five inches on the ground. My husband plowed a path up the driveway, but it was still narrow and banked with snow.

“I am not letting you in. I don’t know who you are. Let me call my husband and he can come out and see what you need,” I said. Despite my innate desire to draw him into our warm house, I knew from past unexpected visitors that being naïve could be dangerous.

I was beginning to suspect that the man had dementia. He seemed confused and a bit disheveled. My husband, who has never met a stranger and loves the challenge of a difficult situation, stomped up the basement stairs. “What’s going on? I’m still in a meeting?” I motioned to the back door. “He says he’s stuck in our back yard, back behind the pool house.” My husband takes in the news as I did – confused as to how a car could be lodged that far into our back yard.

He pulls on boots and a coat and goes out to talk to him. After about five minutes they are both in the garage and the man is taking off his shoes. “He is confused but he is harmless,” my husband said. “And the car is stuck back by the woods behind the pool house, just as he said. He had the shovel in his trunk.”

I text my 30-year-old daughter, who lives five minutes away with her husband, to tell her what is going on. She immediately says, “sounds like a dead body situation to me.”

I invite the stranger into our kitchen. Our gray-whiskered black lab cozies up to him. “Where were you headed this evening,” I ask him as he takes a seat at the old oak table that is covered with kid crap. He stares at me. “I’m not sure,” he says. My husband pulls me aside and says he has called the brother. “He said his brother fell down the stairs recently and was hospitalized. He has been confused.” Two brothers are on their way to pick him up and help get the car out of our yard.

“Well, he shouldn’t be driving,” I say.

My husband and I are well versed in this loss of license lingo. We both help our elderly parents – all four have lost their ability to drive. 

We find out that the stranger is a member of our Catholic Church, and he retired from a local company we know. Living in a small town narrows the world – something we found out about a decade earlier with a similar car-in-the-yard experience.

It was Christmas Eve. My husband and I had just huffed up and down the stairs dozens of times laden with gifts and stocking stuffers for our four kids. We still played the Santa Claus routine, even though our kids were all beyond the believing. We had left the outside Christmas lights on. In those years, Todd would use his bucket truck to reach the highest peaks of our roof. Lit up like the proverbial Christmas tree, our house, perched on a wooded hill just beyond our townships’ housing developments, was plenty visible. But the driveway generally kept people from coming up to view the lights. 

We climbed into our bed on the second floor. Todd, as per his usual habit, was asleep instantly. I dozed but was startled awake by a banging on the front door. I nudged Todd awake. “Did you hear that? What was that? Who could be at our door?” It was well after midnight. 

I pull on my robe; he gets out of bed and starts downstairs in his underwear. I follow. He pulls open the door a crack and a young woman is standing on the porch nearly yelling, “Is this C.P.’s house?” (initials used to protect the innocent). We look at each other then look at her. The person she has mentioned graduated from high school with us and lives in another housing development not far from ours. “I know this is it. I have to get back inside,” she says.

We insist that this is not his house. We tell her how to get there. We shut the door and go back to bed.

“That was really weird wasn’t it,” I say as we lie there in the semi dark. “Very weird,” Todd answers. 

Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.

This time the banging is louder, more insistent and seems to be coming from the back kitchen door. I get down the stairs first. The same woman is at the back door now and she is frantic.  I open the door to talk to her. “Is this C.P.’s house? Is he here? I need help. My car is stuck in the yard.”

“Your car is stuck in the yard?” I ask. “Do you mean in the front? Our steep driveway leads to a paved circle in front of our house that enables the driver to easily go back down the hill. More paved area sits behind the garage. A fenced garden and a basketball hoop sit just outside that pavement. “No, back here,” she says, pointing toward the yard and the woods.  “My car is stuck back here in your yard.”

Now that it has happened twice, I suppose I could see how, if you thought our driveway was a road, you might go up the hill, across the pavement in front of the garage, and down the grassy hill, thinking you were on the road.

But that is a very huge stretch.

“And my little boy is in the car,” she adds.

I am stunned. 

Little boy. 

There was no little boy when she came to the front door.

She reeked of alcohol and her behaviors indicated she was probably high too.

“Well, where is he? Is he hurt?” I ask.

“He’s in his car seat. I think he’s okay.”

“Well, go and get him!!!” I holler.

By the time she returns, my husband is back, this time he has a robe slung over his shoulders and is holding a pistol.

I look hard at him.

“Why do you have a gun?”

“You don’t know this woman! You just let her in the back door. She could be a decoy  who was sent back here to distract us while someone else comes in the front door to rob us.”

Nothing of the sort had occurred to me.

By this time the woman and the toddler were in our kitchen. The tow-headed child was well dressed but his face was red from crying. I tried to calm the two of them down, while Todd called the police. We stood in the dimly lit kitchen. Our Christmas tree sparkled in the adjoining family room; piles of presents filled the room. My husband’s theory started to make sense – a robbery set up at a time when people are vulnerable and gifts plentiful. 

Two officers arrived quickly, and one escorted the woman back outside to search the wrecked car and to test her for drugs and alcohol. He asked me to mind the child. The poor dear cried and cried. He just kept saying “mommy, mommy, mommy….” How frightening it must have been to be in a stranger’s house in the middle of the night. All I kept thinking was that he should have been in bed hours ago, visions of sugar plums dancing in his head. What kind of Christmas morning would this baby have?

Despite the banging, the crying, the shouting, our four kids stayed upstairs. “I heard the commotion, but I figured we had to stay in our beds if we wanted the presents to come,” my son told us the next morning. Two daughters slept right through it.

While I was still holding the child, we went outside to see where the car was. She had driven beyond the pavement behind the garage, slammed into a tree and was stuck in the mud of our back yard. We stared at the surreal scene as the police officer interviewed the woman. Just like Clement Clarke Moore says in his book someone “tore open the shutters and threw up the sash.” Our oldest daughter, still a college student, stayed in a remodeled room above our garage. She stuck half her body out the window, her long blonde hair dangled around her face as she leaned down: “What is going on down there? I hear a baby crying, a police siren, and people shouting. Santa Claus? Baby Jesus? I mean it is Christmas Eve. Who are these people?” 

I didn’t have answers. None of it made any sense.

When the police officer finished his work with the woman, he cuffed her and put her in the police car. The other officer took the child. “Where is this baby going to go on Christmas Eve,” I asked, tears forming.

“She’s high as a kite,” he said. “I guess she was at a house down the street. She left to party with someone and was trying to go back there and thought this was the right house. We will try to find family to take the child, but, if not, he will go with a foster family until we get things figured out.”

It had been just like the first part of Moore’s poem:

‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house

Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;

The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,

In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there;

The children were nestled all snug in their beds;

While visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads;

And mamma in her ‘kerchief, and I in my cap,

Had just settled our brains for a long winter’s nap,

When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,

I sprang from my bed to see what was the matter.

                  But it hadn’t ended the same way. It wouldn’t be a “Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!” We learned years later that the young woman came from a good family, that she had gotten involved with the wrong people, and that addiction took her life. We learned that the little boy was raised by family members.

                  I tried for years to understand why that young woman and her baby boy were sent to our house on Christmas Eve – a woman looking for shelter and assistance just like Mary did on that first Christmas. We didn’t do much to help her – we invited her in, we comforted her child, we made sure they were safe. Same for the elderly man who showed up with his shovel. We fed him, we talked to him, we made sure he got home safely.

                  Why did they go off the more populated path to our house? Was it a beacon on a hill, promising some sort of safety? Were they here so we could help them, or was their presence here really a pop quiz for us? We routinely fill our home and our pool with loved ones.

 Loving the loved is easy.

                  But what do we do with the stranger? 

                  The needs of others interrupt, impose, irritate. 

                  Responsibility for the stranger makes us realize the narrowness of our compassion. 

                  Jimmy Stewart dives off the bridge to save Clarence in It’s a Wonderful Life. By saving Clarence’s life, he saves himself too and then discovers that he has saved an angel. “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it,” says Hebrews 13:2. Welcoming strangers is a common theme in the Old and New Testaments. Jesus says, “I was a stranger, and you welcomed me.” (Matthew 25:35) Jesus interrupted the lives of many strangers. We think we know him; we think we would let him in if he came banging on our door in the middle of the night.

                  I watched a disturbing video of a priest in our area that was circulated amongst the faithful. The priest is screaming at a man who says he has come to the church for help. The priest says he does not know the man. You can hear the man gently asking the priest for assistance and the priest screaming at him “Silence!! You are crazy and you are threatening our church. I am calling the police to take you away.” It is quite evident that this shepherd of the flock wants nothing to do with this man. He will wash his hands of it. He will serve the Lord, but not if it means serving the stranger.

                  Another priest, a friend who lived alone in our rectory, often had people ringing his bell and asking for assistance. Despite what created a dangerous situation for him, he often opened the door to the stranger and provided a little cash for a meal or offered to call one of the social service agencies.  

                  No one caught his actions on video.

                  He acted in the dark. Alone. 

                  Jesus said be not afraid. 

                  In 1977, Billy Joel released an album, and a title song called The Stranger. He has said that the song is about the shadow self that resides in all of us – that portion of our personality that even our closest friends and lovers do not know.

The Chorus:

                  Well, we all fall in love
But we disregard the danger
Though we share so many secrets
There are some we never tell
Why were you so surprised
That you never saw the stranger?
Did you ever let your lover
See the stranger in yourself?

                  Don’t we all have some mental illness, some dementia, some addiction or have at least some tendencies toward all of these? Don’t we all have a stranger within ourselves that even we sometimes shut the door to? It would be impossible to understand how each life with which we interact impacts the stranger. 

Fr. James Martin, Jesuit priest, author, editor-at-large of America magazine, and defender of the marginalized, says: “The most important thing will be to listen to the voice of the Holy Spirit, active and alive in all the People of God, especially those who are poor or marginalized in any way.”  Jesus didn’t say to help the stranger only if it is convenient, only if it doesn’t interrupt your schedule, only if there are no risks, only if the stranger is kind and grateful. The two strangers who drove their cars into our yard forced us to face our frail limit of compassion. They drove into our lives and rode out of it, leaving us marked with their presence and their vulnerability.