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Let me tell you about the men who count pills instead of blessings on Christmas Eve.

December in Chicago, 1929. The kind of cold that doesn't just bite – it devours. Wind howling between buildings like a hungry beast, searching for stragglers who've lost their way home. Because some don't have homes to lose.

A boarding house clerk fumbles with his keys – room inspections, standard procedure. The routine mechanical until room 14. Pills scattered across the floor like confetti from some grotesque celebration. Old Joe, they called him. Nobody knew his last name. Nobody asked.

"What a way to celebrate your last Christmas," the officer mutters, jotting notes in his pad. "Makes you wonder why we look forward to them, right?"

But there was another man – Frank Holm, a Czechoslovakian with watery eyes and a thick accent – who understood exactly why Joe had chosen Christmas for his exit. Because Christmas, with its forced joy and family gatherings, is the cruelest season for the forgotten.

Twenty years earlier, Frank stood on a platform in his homeland, steam from a locomotive shrouding him as his mother clutched his hand, begging: "Promise me, son, you will never go where you cannot take the Lord Jesus with you."

The promise was easy to make. Impossible to keep.

Frank arrived in Chicago with determination and skill, a mechanic ready to build his fortune. Instead, he met Hank – a man who taught him that America wasn't about working hard but about "easing off" and "unwinding." First it was drinks after work. Then during work. Then instead of work.

One Thanksgiving, Frank visits his cousins – hardworking immigrants who'd built a life while he'd dismantled his. They owned their home. A piece of the American dream. Frank owned nothing but the stink of failure and the weight of a broken promise.

He leaves abruptly, the smell of their roasted turkey and clean linens following him like an accusation.

Back in his filthy rented room, Frank decides to follow Old Joe's path. Drink until the darkness takes him. No more struggling. No more disappointment.

But Christmas Eve brings an unexpected sound – carols floating through his window from mission workers on the street below.

"Who are those people?" Frank asks another derelict they call Norski.

"Christians. From the mission. They do programs."

Programs. Church. Warmth.

Inside the mission building, it's clean and filled with music that feels almost obscene against their desperate lives. The director announces "a gift that can give you a brand new start."

A new start. The words echo in Frank's hollowed-out soul as he returns to his boarding house. Could anyone really start over after wasting twenty years?

Christmas morning arrives with Frank postponing his suicide just long enough to hear about this gift. Just long enough for one more free meal.

"Because of Jesus," the mission director explains to the room of forgotten men, "we're offered freedom from sin and a chance to start over. No matter who you are or what you've done."

A woman approaches, inviting Christians to kneel and pray. Frank, desperate to belong, agrees. But as his knees hit the floor, twenty years of failure come crashing down. The weight of a forgotten promise. The knowledge that he's been running toward death when life had been offered all along.

Frank weeps. Confesses. Believes. Beside him, Norski does the same, though he protests: "It's too late for me."

"You don't know what I've done," Norski whispers.

"It doesn't matter," Frank tells him. "He said we all qualify for the free gift."

They walked out into the cold Chicago streets differently than they entered – still homeless, still poor, but carrying something no one could take away. Hope.

Years later, Frank would stand be