On Christmas Eve, 1968, Apollo 8 became the first manned spacecraft from Earth to orbit the moon. It had been a hell of a year — the Vietnam War was raging, protests and riots rocked the US and other countries as well, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., had been assassinated… I wouldn’t be born for another nine months, but I imagine it must have seemed as if civilization itself was on the brink. And then from a tiny vehicle about the size of a family car, all alone out there in the endless dark, came two remarkable gifts: a color photograph of the Earth rising over the surface of the moon, taken during the first moment human eyes had ever seen such a thing, and a reading of the book of Genesis by three men who were farther away from home than any human had ever been.

If you’ve never heard that reading — awkward, filled with static and long pauses as the astronauts passed the microphone and script between themselves, and yet achingly earnest as it reaches out across a quarter-million miles with a message of hope — I urge you to go hit YouTube and give it a listen. It’s easy to find. And it’s powerful. I’m not a religious person, but I can’t help being moved every time I hear it, especially by the sign-off, which appears on the image below. The reading was broadcast on live television all over the world, and was, at the time, the most-watched TV program ever.

I think about that broadcast and the Earthrise photo every Christmas Eve. It seems especially poignant to me this year.