It was decided, though no one could say who decided it first, that humanity would end itself on Christmas. Not out of devotion. Not out of malice. Out of a particular exhaustion, the kind that settles over a species the way frost settles over a corpse; quietly, inevitably, without spectacle.

Some called it a gift for Jesus. Others called it a release for themselves. Most didn’t call it anything at all. Naming things only gives them weight, and humanity had grown tired of carrying anything with weight.

The idea spread the way despair always spreads: silently, with the elegance of a shadow that has finally stopped pretending to be anything else. By Advent, the world understood the plan without having spoken it. By Christmas Eve, the world accepted it the way a terminal patient accepts a prognosis.

There was no mass panic, no riots. Absurdity rarely inspires hysteria, only a kind of philosophical shrug.

One by one, city by city, continent by continent, humanity closed its eyes and unmade itself. No great violence. No catastrophe. Just a soft relinquishing, like candles choosing not to burn. When the last human fell into that darkness — a darkness strangely calm, strangely welcoming — the world exhaled for the first time in millennia.

Silence spread across the planet.

A silence so total.

Then came the surprise…

Jesus, expecting once again the usual hymns and the brittle cheer of obligatory joy, found instead the entire human race standing before Him in the soft luminosity of the afterworld. Billions of eyes, all sharing the same expression: the expression of beings who didn’t quite regret existing, but regretted having tried too hard to justify it.

“Happy birthday,” someone murmured. It wasn’t festive. It wasn’t ironic. It was spoken the way one apologizes for overstaying a life. Jesus looked at them — at this species that had repeatedly fumbled both suffering and hope — and for a long moment He said nothing.

Finally He whispered, “You weren’t all meant to come at once.”

A few souls nodded. Some shrugged. One laughed softly, the laugh of someone who has spent a lifetime wrestling with the absurd only to die of it. “We thought it would be a surprise,” another said.

“A surprise,” Jesus repeated, not angry, not sad, but with weary tenderness of someone who watched a child break their own toy just to make sense of its pieces.

He continued to send them back, but to what? To the same repetition? The same spiral between meaning and meaninglessness? Even He wondered if return was a kindness or cruelty.

He told them the truth: a truth so simple it was almost cruel in its clarity:

“Existence was the only miracle I ever gave you. What you made of it was your burden.” The souls felt no shame. Shame was for the living.

Instead they stood there, suspended in a light that illuminated nothing but themselves. Beings who had fled the weight of existence only to find that consciousness follows like a shadow. And so humanity spent eternity as it had spent life: questioning, doubting, arguing with itself, trying to make sense of a gesture no one had requested and no one had fully understood.

Jesus remained with them, not as judge or savior, but as a witness to their absurd act. The only species in creation to annihilate itself out of equal parts fatigue and affection.

A birthday surprise.

A cosmic misunderstanding.

A final proof that even in its ending, humanity insisted on being both tragic and ridiculous. The only combination it ever truly mastered.