Evergreen Hearts

By Cliff Potts

The song drifted out of the mall speakers like syrup poured over air.

Christmas isn’t a season, it crooned.
It lives forever in your heart.
Just remember Jesus.
Peace will follow.

Everyone nodded. Everyone always nodded.

He heard it while standing in line at the returns counter, holding a blender he didn’t want anymore. He’d bought it for a woman who left three weeks before Christmas. She took the knives when she went. The good ones. That detail still irritated him more than it should have.

The cashier smiled without looking at him. A child cried somewhere near electronics. The song kept insisting—soft, sweet, and unbothered—that peace was permanent if you believed correctly.

He didn’t feel peace. He felt thinned out. Used up. The kind of tired that comes from doing what you were told was right and discovering it didn’t protect you from anything.

Outside the mall, a woman sat on a bench wrapped in a coat that had lost its shape years ago. She looked about twenty-eight. Too young to be that worn down. Too young to have learned how to make herself invisible so efficiently. Her face carried the patient vacancy of someone who had stopped expecting rescue.

Inside, the song promised glowing hearts and eternal seasons.

The lie wasn’t subtle.

That was the problem with the song—it treated peace like a sentiment, not a condition. Like something you could summon with memory and melody instead of food, shelter, safety, and the refusal to grind people into margins.

The song didn’t mention the folded eviction notice in his jacket pocket.
It didn’t mention the silent TVs looping wars without sound.
It didn’t mention the woman outside, aging in real time while shoppers debated gift cards.

It just kept smiling.

If Jesus was listening, this version of him—soft-focus, endlessly reassuring—would have been unrecognizable.

The man in the stories didn’t tell people peace lived in their hearts if they remembered hard enough. He fed people first. He disrupted comfort. He made it clear that nice feelings were not the same thing as love.

The song stripped all of that away and replaced it with a command disguised as comfort: Feel better.

He stepped outside. The cold didn’t pretend to be anything else. He handed the blender to the woman without explanation. She stared at it, confused, then laughed—short and startled, like she’d forgotten laughter was still available to her.

It was absurd. A blender. Heavy. Useless on a bench.

But pawnable.

Maybe ten dollars. Enough for an almost-meal at some corporate fast-food mercy window. Enough to stay upright one more night.

For a brief moment, something like peace appeared—not the song’s peace. Not the eternal, effortless kind. This one was temporary, fragile, and required action.

Behind him, the chorus swelled again, promising Christmas without cost, love without labor, Jesus without disruption.

He walked away knowing what the song never would:

Peace is not stored in the heart.
Love is not preserved by repetition.
And Christmas, if it means anything at all, is not something you feel—

—it’s something you do, usually at a loss.

The song faded behind him.

Reality did not.

And inconveniently, that was where Jesus had always been.

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