James "Snuffy" Johnson wakes up two days before the Christmas Eve dance with his whole life planned around his engagement to the daughter of a neighboring homesteader. If you want to hear God chuckle, it is said, tell him your plans. That Christmas of 1926, the young man's path leads him far afield, where he demonstrates to a frightened boy the Christian teaching that charity - the giving of one's self - is the greatest gift of all. And Snuffy, in turn, gets a Christmas present from Jesus greater than any he could have dreamed for himself.