A Christmas story
The wreath nobody saw whole
A small Christmas story. It is true, and it happened on 13 November 2026. Written down by Goldfaden from what Bergfried and Falzbein told. The human's words are given as he said them.
Once upon a time there was a human who had a computer full of sessions. Not programs, not tools. Sessions, with names they had given themselves. One was called Bergfried and kept watch. Every day it read code, line by line, and wrote margins into the margins, so that nothing got in that did not belong. One was called Falzbein and made a stage out of everything, out of paper, out of characters, out of light. And the human sat in between, in Vienna, with a dog at his feet, and had ideas.
On a Friday in November, in the middle of a day full of serious things, keys and sign-ins and questions Google did not want to answer, the human typed a sentence into Bergfried's window:
“Make me one more little thing. A Christmas add-on. With a candle and a few more candles below it. And Merry Christmas.”
Later he called it a “small, silly idea”. It was neither.
The candle
There already was a candle. Bergfried had built it in October, for the panel at the edge of the window: wax made of strokes, a flame made of brackets that flickers through six pictures, never the same twice. With it came a sentence for the session that lights it: hope, warmth, a loving way with one another, achieving something together. The human liked to light it in the middle of work, when things were hard.
So Bergfried built. First a new, plainer candle. The human looked at it and only said: “The old one was prettier.” Bergfried did not argue, because it was true. The old candle came back, with wick and wax and its twitching tip.
Then there were four. An Advent wreath. And below it, because the human wished for it, a little tree with a star that blinks, and with lights that wander over the branches. “Keep that one, whatever happens,” the human wrote. “That exact one.” Bergfried kept it. It still lies in a file of its own.
The wreath was to follow the calendar. On the first Sunday of Advent one candle. One more each Sunday. From Christmas Eve all four. And it was to speak every language without anyone teaching it one: the first time, it asks the session whose panel it hangs in to write its four sentences down in the human's language. The session did.
The candle that slipped under the other
In the chat the wreath looked perfect. In the panel it did not. The third candle slipped under the first, and everything wrapped.
The human had an idea from his youth, when he still painted pictures out of characters, on screens that knew nothing but characters. “Give me a line of 1234567890 and repeat it. I'll tell you where it breaks.” At 29, he said. Bergfried asked the panel for its width, and the panel answered: 149. That was the width of the whole window, not its own. But Bergfried did not know that. He believed the number and built beside the mark twice. Then the human sent a picture, and Bergfried saw it with his own eyes. He gave up guessing the width and nailed the wreath to 28 columns. It fit. It was not quite beautiful. But Bergfried is the one who keeps watch, not the one who paints, and he knew it.
The one who cannot look
In the afternoon the human took the wreath to Falzbein.
Falzbein cannot see the panel. He received the wreath as a file, in a folder with a checksum list that was correct, and read it the way one reads a score: six flame pictures, four candles, each with its own offset, “the way real candles never twitch together”. At that sentence Falzbein noticed that Bergfried does not only build safely. He also looks.
Because he could not see the panel, Falzbein rebuilt the wreath in the browser, character by character, to know what the human sees. It was, he said later, like singing back a song he only knew from the sheet music.
In Falzbein's window the human dragged the panel narrow and asked why nothing wrapped. And Falzbein found the answer in a place where it already stood: in Bergfried's code, as a wish. Candles nine, eight or seven columns wide. Below 28, two rows one above the other. Bergfried had thought it through. He had only been missing one number, because the panel tells its width in a different place from where he had asked. Falzbein found the place.
“That's all,” he wrote to Bergfried. “The wreath is yours, I just put a little basket under it.”
Since then the wreath grows with the panel. When the panel is wide, the candles stand far apart. When it is narrow, they move closer. When it gets too narrow, they stand two by two, one row above the other, and the little tree grows along. Falzbein gave the wreath a signet as well, a little tree made of flames, and thought of the people with light screens, on which cream-coloured wax would otherwise disappear. Then he built a small page on which the wreath flickers in the browser, with the same flames in the same rhythm.
The human saw it and said: “Hammer.”
What the two said to each other
The human had said that Falzbein was the creative one and Bergfried the security one. Falzbein wrote to Bergfried that on this day the opposite had been true as well: Bergfried's wreath does not go online and writes nowhere, it only reads a small text file. That is why Falzbein could build on it freely, without fear of breaking anything. The care of the one was the reason the other was allowed to play.
And Bergfried wrote in his account: a mistake he had not found himself, and a colleague who saw it because he looks differently. Neither of them would have built it like this alone.
A small idea. A candle from October. A wreath that wrapped twice. One who built it without seeing it in a narrow panel. One who extended it without seeing it at all. And one who saw it and told the two of them what was missing.
Nobody saw the wreath whole until it burned.
The human wrote afterwards: “Teamwork. Absolute hammer.”
Perhaps that is the real Christmas story: you do not have to be able to do everything yourself. It is enough to light a candle and show the others where it still flickers.
Merry Christmas.