Somewhere in Georgia. The hotel lobby is festooned with Christmas decor and holly, and the place smells like a cross between a cinnamon bun and a bottle of industrial ammonia.

My wife and I are checking out of our room. We are in travel mode. We need to get on the road. Need to keep moving. Need to put miles behind us.

But right now my wife apparently has other plans. Because she is standing at the front desk having an in-depth conversation with the hotel receptionist. They are laughing and carrying on while I stand around waiting like a wart.

In exactly one hour and forty-five minutes the Iron Bowl will be on television, the century’s biggest rivalry football game, and I’m going to miss it because my wife is having a heartfelt conversation with a total stranger, talking about—I am not joking—cute baby clothes.

I wander toward the lobby’s TV which is blaring with gameday sports commentary. I watch and I wait for my bride.

After thirty seconds of watching the football pundits, I realize something: The intelligence

of the sports commentators has really gone downhill in recent years.

COMMENTATOR: “...Bob, we know for certain that whoever scores the most touchdowns in today’s matchup will absolutely, without a doubt, become, ultimately, the winner of today’s game...”

I don’t want to be exposed to this.

But because I’m stuck here, I sit on the lobby sofa to watch.

Seated on the couch beside me is a little girl with curly blond hair. She is watching TV, too.

“Hi,” I say. “Is this seat taken?”

She says nothing at first. She only looks at me briefly, then back at the television. Shy.

“Hi,” she chirps.

She is done talking now.

“Did you have a happy Thanksgiving?” I ask because I have the obnoxious gift of gab.

She turns to look at me. I can see a large scar on the…

“When I was a kid, we didn’t have no Christmas tree,” said the waitress, placing a hamburger on the table before me.

I was in North Georgia, in a restaurant attached to a gas station. My waitress’s name was Sharon. I know this because her name tag said “SHARON.”

“No tree?” I said, lifting the top bun to make sure everything was okay under the hood.

“Nosir. Didn’t get no presents, neither. My mama worked too hard to spend money on that kinda stuff. Mama paid bills and bought food.”

She passed me the Heinz for my fries. I used the butt of my palm to spank the bottle until it repented.

My server was middle-aged, with hair that was straw colored, and she wore a sweatshirt with the name of a local high school on it.

“So,” I said, “no trees and no gifts, how did your family celebrate?”

She smiled. Her teeth were blindingly white, perfectly straight—a credit to her genetics, her dental care professional, or her prosthodontist. She had a great smile.

“Celebrate? Shoot. We didn’t.”

“At all?”

She shook her head and started jingling the change in her apron. “Not until I was nineteen.”

“Why nineteen?”

“That was the year Mama died. Mama died in an accident coming home from work. It was awful. Worst day of my life. Drunk driver got her. Had to raise all eight of my brothers and sisters after that. My dad was a deadbeat.”

She looked off as though she were posing for a Renoir.

“Know what I did that first Christmas?”

“Pray tell.”

“Well, we couldn’t afford no tree. But out in our shed we had cans of old green paint, ‘cause our trailer was green on the outside. So I cleared a place in the living room and I painted a tree on the wall.

“Then we all made flowery ornaments and stuff from pieces of tin foil,…

This is Maria’s story. Why she entrusted it to a hapless boy columnist like myself is beyond me. Either way, our story begins in a humble cafeteria, filled with homeless people.

They are all here for the free annual holiday meal. All who enter are given hand sanitizer and hot cocoa.

Maria volunteers here. She has been helping serve hot meals all week, and she volunteers here year round. This volunteering tradition started many years ago. It’s a long story.

When she was a kid her late father was an alcoholic. But when Maria hit age 13, he got sober. Her father started attending AA meetings and won his life back. The main thing her father learned from these support group meetings was that (a) each meeting had donuts, which increased your pant size considerably, and (b) helping others is the only thing worth doing with your life.

Oh, how she misses him.

The mess hall is overrun with people who are dressed in ragged clothing. Some suffer from mental illness, some are

addicted, others have breath that is 190 proof.

Maria stands behind the sneeze guard, dressed in facemask and hairnet. She serves them all steaming helpings. She is cheery, fun, and she flirts with the old guys because they get such a kick out of this.

One elderly man smiles at her. “Maria, I wish I were twenty years younger, I’d marry you.”

She throws out a hip and says, “And just what would YOU know about marriage, Mister Dan?”

“Hey, I know a lot. I’ve had three very successful marriages.”

She cackles. She gives him an extra helping of green beans and reminds him to behave.

Another old guy shuffles toward her. He wears a leather hat and a large backpack. His pants have gaping holes, he reeks of ammonia and body odor. She dishes his plate. The man’s eyes become pink and wet when he sees…

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. Yeah, I know most folks would choose Christmas as their favorite, but not me. Namely, because I was a chubby kid, and we chubby kids preferred our holidays to center around cholesterol.

In my family, the ladies would get started preparing many days in advance for the big calorie party. You’d see females dusting countertops with flour, working tirelessly on butcher blocks, wielding surgically sharp cutlery, and threatening to neuter any male who came within fourteen feet of her range oven.

The house would be a symphony of chopping sounds, cabinets slamming, and the roar of Briggs & Stratton twelve-horsepower hand-mixers. Christmas simply could not compare.

At Thanksgiving the food spread was sinful enough to qualify for an R rating. We had heaps of refined carbohydrates, wads of saturated fat, volcanoes of gluten, and fruit pies that were completely obscured by Reddi Whip.

Whereas at Christmas all I got was khakis.

Our childhood home would also be inundated with loud family members. Sometimes there were people loitering in

our house who I’d never even met.

“Come say hello to your cousin Hilda,” my mother would say, matting my hair with her own spit.

Cousin Hilda was ninety-four years old, a complete stranger to me, and she talked at length about the disruptive nature of kidney stones to anyone within earshot.

All day the walls of our little house would throb with the sounds of human voices. And even though our family was decidedly dysfunctional, it was pretty fun.

My uncle would sit on a sofa, reading the newspaper, sipping Pabst, yelling at his kids. He did this even though his kids were, for example, in their late forties.

Other uncles and male cousins would hang out in the driveway, trying to look masculine. This is a typical male activity at Thanksgiving—driveway standing.

Driveway standing is not a difficult sport to engage in. It goes like…

The Billy Graham Library is just a barn, really. A big barn, mind you. An elaborate, 40,000 square-foot, state-of-the-art barn, plopped in Charlotte, North Carolina, complete with a bookstore, gift shop, food court, and a mechanical animatronic talking cow á la Disneyland.

But a barn nonetheless.

Billy Graham is buried on these grounds. His wife Ruth lies beside him. The remains of gospel singer George Beverly Shea rest here also.

William Franklin Graham Jr. was born and raised only a few miles from here. His memorial library hosts upwards of 200,000 annual visitors, ranging from U.S. presidents and dignitaries, to third-grade field trips and Midwestern retirees in Reeboks.

Today, the place was packed.

You can say what you will about the man, you can even attempt to muddy his good name. But even years after his death, Billy still pulls them in.

I remember when Billy Graham would come on TV. In our house, life completely stopped. My father would quit piddling in the garage. My mother would unchain herself from her stovetop.

Granny would

sit on the sofa, poised before our Philco console television, legs crossed. I sat on the floor six inches from the glowing screen since I was the family remote control.

And we would watch America’s pulpiteer preach to packed arenas in New York City, L.A., Paris, Germany, and Budapest.

“God loves you!” Billy would shout, pointing that spindly finger at the camera. “He loves you, and you, and you…”

And since I was nose-to-nose with the TV, his message always felt particularly personal.

At the close of his sermons when George Beverly Shea would sing “Just As I Am,” Granny would say, “Turn it up!”

I’d crank the volume and Granny would sing every word without ever dropping the cigarette from the corner of her mouth.

Truthfully, as a boy I didn’t know the difference between Billy Graham and God himself. Not until Jimmy Williams…

M. Judson Booksellers is located downtown Greenville, South Carolina, right on Main Street. This is your quintessential bookstore, complete with comfy chairs, hardwood floors, and high-brow autobiographical material authored by Willie Nelson.

I walked inside and was immediately greeted by The Smell.

You know The Smell. It is the sacrosanct aroma found inside all establishments that peddle the printed word. I could live on this smell. It is the fragrance of libraries, bookstores, and newsstands. The smell is one part paper, one part soy-based ink. The scent is a narcotic for book nerds.

Oh, how I love books. I love them too much.

I was a dropout, you see. Not long after my father’s funeral I simply decided to quit going to school. We were rural people. Back then it wasn’t unusual for a kid to stop showing up for class. Happened all the time.

Today, of course, you couldn’t get away with such idiocy. You try dropping out today and you’ll end up in juvenile hall, chained to a desk, forced to read Tolstoy. Currently, there

are even laws in some states where dropouts cannot receive driver’s licenses.

Times have certainly changed. Because back in the day if you quit school, nothing happened. Nobody made a fuss. And so I willingly became a loser.

And that’s the thing about dropouts. They don’t like themselves very much. I realize I’m generalizing here, but almost every dropout I’ve ever met feels one of two ways about themselves:

They are either deeply ashamed, or they are falsely arrogant. Both attitudes are creeks shooting from the same ugly river. A river named Inferiority Complex.

Many dropouts also feel one of two ways about books: They either love them, or they avoid them like head lice.

I’ve worked alongside dropouts on construction jobsites who had severe aversions to books, refusing to use them for anything but leveling imbalanced tables and killing cockroaches.

And then,…

Greenville, South Carolina, is already gussied up for Christmas. There is a bite in the air. The foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the distance make the town look downright Rockwellian.

This is a baseball city. Fluor Field sits on Main Street, home to the Greenville Drive, a minor league affiliate of the Boston Red Sox. The ballpark is a mini-replica of Boston’s Fenway Park—right down to its ginormous green outfield wall.

The gates are closed today, baseball is out of season, but you can almost imagine the sound of 6,700 ballpark fans roaring wildly as they stand in line to use the men’s room.

Outside the ballpark is a life-sized bronze statue of “Shoeless” Joe Jackson. Joe is depicted at the plate, bat over his shoulder, eyes glancing above centerfield.

I am at the statue now, talking to an old guy in a ratty Clemson hoodie who sips something from a Styrofoam cup. He wears fingerless gloves and asks passersby for money.

“Yo, man,” was the old fella’s opening introduction to me. “I need to eat. I’ll

probably die tonight if I can’t eat.”

Then he lit a cigarette and answered a call on his Bluetooth headset.

I give him a few bucks. In exchange he tells me a story.

He jerks a thumb toward the statue. “That’s Shoeless Joe. Best ball player to ever live. Born and raised here in Greenville.”

“That so?”

“You dang right.”

An underweight Santa impersonator is posing for pictures across the street. A busker sings “I’ll Be Home For Christmas” and sounds like a cat with its tail caught in a box fan.

And my tour guide is just getting warmed up.

“Joe Jackson used to own the liquor store on Pendleton Street. You ever heard’a Joe Jackson, man?”

I nod. Of course I’ve heard of Shoeless Joe. My granddaddy was a boy when the infamous “Black Sox” World Series scandal occurred.…