Granddaddy placed me on his knee, he fuzzed my hair and smoked his Bing Crosby pipe. The world smelled like Prince Albert in a can.

“The year was 1862,” Granddaddy began his story. “The day was Christmas. The place was eastern Virginia.”

East Virginia. God’s country. Where the Rappahannock River traverses the Blue Ridge Mountains, then dumps itself into the Chesapeake like a pitcher of ice tea. The War was on. The landscape was torn up from war.

“And it was so cold,” said Granddaddy.

Paralyzingly cold. The winter of 1862 was brutal. You could break a tooth eating a bowl of soup.

Eighteen-year-old privates were sleeping on barren earth, huddled together like puppies beneath woolen blankets. Grown men—military men—spooned together, just to survive.

But this cold snap was nothing compared to the hunger. Some soldiers were so hungry they were eating their tobacco. There are stories about soldiers eating their own shoe leather.

Christmas morning came with fresh misery. A wet snow had fallen overnight. Gaggles of army boys awoke with frostbitten noses and frozen

earlobes. Others were coughing themselves to death.

The opposing armies were camped on opposite sides of the river. Gray coats on one side. Blues on the other. Before evening, these countrymen would probably be killing each other. “It was a hell of a time to be a soldier.”

I interrupted my Baptist grandfather. “Grandaddy, you can’t say ‘hell.’”

My grandfather, the grizzled veteran who spent his youth dodging shells in Anzio, Italy, said, “Son, there is no other word for war but hell.”

That morning, a few young soldiers were on patrol near the banks of the Rappahannock. They stopped patrolling when they saw the enemy on the other side of the river, also patrolling.

Both groups halted.

Soldiers on both sides of the river were skin and bones, with sunken eyes and the pallor of cadavers.

It was a stare down between adversaries.…

It was dark when we pulled up in the wilds of Locust Fork, Alabama. A big group of us. The small house stood in the country. I think the cows were watching us.

A throng of us fell out of our vehicles like clowns riding in circus cars. We had guitars, banjos, accordions. It was cold, we were wearing jackets and goofy smiles.

“Shouldn’t we knock on the door first?” someone said.

“No, you don’t knock on the door.”

“But how will they hear us if we don’t tell them we’re here?”

“We have to sing loud and wait for them to offer us figgy pudding and stuff.”

“This house is built like Fort Knox. They’ll never hear us outside.”

Thus, we all stared at the cold, masonry exterior looking back at us. We sang as loud as we could.

For song lyrics, some of us carried paper books. Others just made them up. We sang the main carols. “Silent Night,” “The First Noel,”

“Bohemian Rhapsody.”

We waited for someone inside to notice us, lingering outdoors, wearing our funny hats, wassailing our butts off. But nobody did at first.

Someone among us pointed out the obvious. “We are, literally, singing to a wall.”

Then we saw a young woman come to the door. She was slender and small. College age. Her hair is the color of fire. She has a tiny feeding tube affixed beneath her nose. Her steps were cautious, but we were all so proud she was walking again. There are a lot of people who have been praying for Morgan Love.

Morgan has been through hell. She’s been in and out of hospitals for most of this year. Recently, she just arrived home from Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. Her stomach and intestines haven’t been working right. But through it all, the young woman has remained a…

I remember the day we got married. I was a bundle of nerves. I didn’t know what to do with myself. So I just drove around town in my car.

I ended up eating a huge lunch at a barbecue joint because I was so nervous. I didn’t know what else to do with my time, so I ate a big barbecue sandwich. Then I ate one more. Then I ate a third sandwich.

I remember the way I felt when I arrived at the church. Like I was going to puke. Either from the 27 pounds of pulled pork I had just eaten, or from the anxiety. Or both.

I was trembling. I remember feeling so stupid. I can’t explain it. Like a kid playing dress-up. Like I wasn’t fully an adult. Like I had no right to be here.

I threw the truck into park, stared at the church, and wondered whether I should turn around and drive away. I could just aim my truck for Canada,

and nobody would ever find me.

The parking lot was filling with cars. People were walking into the church. And I was caught in a daze, just watching them.

I remember finally walking into the groom’s dressing room. Like a zombie. My uncle was standing there. The same uncle who hasn’t smiled since the Woodrow Wilson administration. He was just looking at me with his trademarked scowl.

He said, “Where were you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you getting cold feet?”

“No.”

“You sure?”

I nodded. “Sort of.”

I got dressed. It was my first time ever wearing a tux. I felt ridiculous in it. The necktie made me look like Winston Churchill after a very bad night.

I walked into the sanctuary. The pews were full with three quarters of Brewton, Alabama. I could hardly breathe. Everyone was looking at me.…

The lunch lady noticed him, sitting in the corner. He always ate by himself in the cafeteria. He never interacted with the other students. There were holes in his shoes.

The older woman approached his table. She knew her presence embarrassed him. She knew he didn’t want the attention.

But hey, sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do.

He was skinny. And in bad need of a haircut. The boy had body odor, too.

“Is this seat taken?” she asked.

He just looked at her.

“Well?” she said. “Is it?”

Without asking, she took a seat. She ate her own lunch beside him. It is a little known fact that lunch ladies actually eat lunch too.

It didn’t take long before she became his friend. They sat together every lunch period. The other kids poked fun at him for eating lunch with an elderly woman. But then, his fellow students could often behave like turds.

She learned a lot about him

that year. She learned that he lived in a broken home. His dad left when he was a baby. His mother had bad habits that occasionally landed her in legal custody. Oftentimes he didn’t have enough food at home.

“What did you have for supper last night?” the lunch lady once asked him.

“I didn’t,” he replied.

That year, on Christmas Eve, the lunch lady had an idea. She got the others in the school kitchen involved. Then she got her church friends involved. It was a covert operation. Hush hush.

One night, under the cover of darkness, a group of older women—dressed in dark colors—crept up to the boy’s home. On his doorstep, they placed a battalion of foil-covered casseroles, with Post-It-note cooking instructions attached. There were sacks of homemade Christmas candy. Peppermint bark, Christmas-tree cookies, gingerbread, salted nut-butter cups, taffy. There were groceries.…

The hospital room was decorated for Christmas. The young man was sitting in his bed, wired up to a horde of machines. The kid was watching something on the television mounted on the wall. Barely able to keep his eyes open. He was 8.

“Are you in any pain,” the nurse asked.

The little boy was weak. His neck was gaunt. His head was covered in bandages. Beneath his cap was a large crescent-moon scar on his scalp, from where doctors had operated on his brain.

“I’m not in pain,” the kid said drowsily.

He was watching some Christmas movie in black and white. His mother remembers this specifically.

His mother was right beside him, reading a book. She was a single mother. She worked full-time as a night waitress, and she worked on a landscaping crew in the daylight hours.

She didn’t notice, but she fell asleep. Because when she awoke, there were medical staffers gathered around her son’s bed. The heart monitor

was as flat as a prairie highway.

They rushed her son away.

“What’s happening to my son!” she screamed.

“Ma’am,” said one staffer. “Try to calm down.”

She called her son’s name. But her boy was already being whisked down the hall by a team of scrubs and lab coats.

She found herself in a waiting room. No family to support her. No parents. No husband. No nothing. She felt as alone as anyone had ever felt. And she needed a cigarette.

That’s when she noticed a guy walking into the waiting room. Jeans and a light jacket. He sat beside her. He started talking with her. A nice guy. Cheerful and easy going. He asked about her son. And she talked to him. She opened up to him. She let him hear it all. She told him everything until she started crying. She…

Winter. The year is 1949. The war has been over for a while, but it’s still fresh on everyone’s minds. Which is why people are having babies like crazy. War does that to people.

This new generation of babies will be known as the Baby Boomers, and each day they are being born by the truckload. These children will grow up one day and change the world by inventing revolutionary things such as DNA fingerprinting, the World Wide Web, the portable dialysis machine, and Donny Osmond.

But not all babies are lucky enough to be born into good lives. By which I mean that some babies have fathers who don’t want them. One woman—I will call her Macy—was pregnant with a baby like that.

So Macy’s mother did what lots of small-town mothers did in those days, she sent Macy away. Macy was supposed to go live with her aunt in Illinois, but it didn’t work out. So Macy tried Kansas City. That didn’t work either. And this brings us to the

beginning of our story.

Macy was alone. And penniless. Without a friend in the world. If we were to describe her situation with the blunt terms that my grandfather might have used: “Macy didn’t have a pot to [ugly word] in, or a [ugly word] window to throw it out of.”

She used her last few bucks to buy a bus ticket to Omaha, because she believed that this was a place where she could make a better life. Maybe nobody would ask questions about illegitimate babies in Omaha. Maybe nobody would bat an eye if she told them she was a widow.

So her bus was purring along when some very crummy weather hit. The weather went from snowstorm to deathstorm in only a few hours. History would later remember this weather system as one of the century’s worst blizzards to hit the Plains.

The bus rolled…

I am not sure whether you understand English, but I’d like to think you do.

I’d like to think that you know exactly what I’m saying to you. I’d like to think I speak fluent dog.

Heaven knows, I speak to you non-stop. Because you’re blind. Because you need me to keep talking. When I talk to you, you don’t feel so disconnected. That way you’re always part of what’s going on.

So I’ve been talking a lot since I brought you home. I say anything and everything to you, so you feel involved.

I tell you when I’m going to the bathroom. When I read a book, I read aloud. When we go for walks, I describe what I’m seeing. I talk to you about the green crabgrass, the particular shade of blue in the sky.

Yeah, I know it’s silly. You probably can’t understand me. Although sometimes I’m not sure.

Sometimes I think you actually know what I’m saying. Because there are occasions when I tell you how much I love you. And when you hear this, you sort of

lean into me like you know precisely what “I love you” means.

Other times, when I tell you “It’s going to be okay,” after something frightens you, you tuck your head into my chest because I think that, on some level, you know. You know what I mean.

I can only imagine how scared you get when a loud sound occurs nearby. I can only guess at how disoriented you feel when you stumble off the curb.

I owe you an apology. I’m sorry. I don’t know how to teach a blind dog. I am learning as I go. I have so much more to learn. I’m reading books. I’m watching videos. I’m trying. I promise you, I am. But I am an inadequate trainer.

Any troublesome issues lie within me, not you. You’re doing perfectly. You have…

It’s weird. Standing on this stage. In this arena. I’m looking at a thousand faces. Many of them are about to be college graduates. And they’re all looking back at me so hopefully, so full of wonder, so wide-eyed and eager, as if to say, “I hope this idiot’s speech isn’t too long.”

Right now, I am making a commencement speech at Northwest Florida State College. I am wearing a suit. Also deodorant. Everyone is sitting in the basketball arena, clad in big robes and flat hats, staring directly at me. I believe many of the graduates are also wearing deodorant.

Most of the graduates are young. Their parents are present, quietly reading through their programs as I speak. Scanning the alphabetical list of graduates' names printed on the program. I can see many parents are just now realizing how many graduate names are on the program today. If, by chance, someone’s last name is, for example, “Williams,” or “Zimmerman,” these people will be stuck in

this arena until the installation of the next pope.

Funny thing. This basketball arena wasn’t here when I attended the school, long ago, shortly after the end of the Spanish-American War. Back before most of these graduates were born.

Northwest Florida State wasn’t even called that. We were Okaloosa-Walton Community College back then. We were just a couple outdated brick buildings, some double-wide trailers, and a drinking fountain that didn’t work.

I attended this school as an adult. On a whim, I walked into Admissions Building C, and I told the ladies behind the desk that I wanted to go to college. I told them I was a middle-school dropout. I told them I had quit school in the seventh grade after my father died.

I told them we were poor folks. My mother lived in a FEMA trailer. I drove a vehicle that predated the Carter Administration.…

I’ve been receiving lots of urgent emails. “Where are your stories on Facebook, Sean!?” one email reads.

“Sean, you’re not on Facebook, are you in a coma?!” “Sean! Our pills are guaranteed to enhance your love life, call today!”

People on Facebook have theories about where I’ve gone. Some are asking whether I am ill, whether I’m on vacation, or whether I am still, technically, alive.

Like this Facebook message:

“I recently heard Sean is not on Facebook because he is dead. I was heartbroken, is this true? Will someone please let us know if there is an estate sale?”

The truth is, I did not quit Facebook. I am in Facebook jail. This means that, among other things, whatever I post on Facebook is either deleted or suppressed so that only my uncle sees it.

It’s unclear why Facebook banned me, since I never talk politics, I don’t use foul language, and I do not post naked pictures very often.

But the

truth is, since I was booted off Facebook, I’ve found enormous freedom without it. I still write every day, and I still share my work on my website and via email, but I feel less restrained.

I’ve been posting on Facebook every day since this column started 10 years ago. That’s 10 years of posts, never missing a day, like a clinically insane person.

What I didn’t realize was how the platform, over time, has molded me into its own image. Facebook trains its users with rewards and punishments. If you post something Facebook agrees with, the algorithm awards you with TONS of likes. It’s exactly like playing slot machines, only no free drinks.

This is why at one point hundreds of thousands of Facebook users started making videos of things they KNEW the algorithm would like. Things like cute puppies. Because it was a well-known fact…

It’s hard to choose my favorite Christmas movie. Each time I try to pick one, I’m afraid I’ll shoot my eye out.

There are, of course, obligatory holiday movies which bring to mind one’s parents and grandparents. A period in post-war national history which featured Buicks Roadmasters, Hula Hoops, and pineapple upside down cakes made almost completely of mayonnaise. This era features movies such as “Miracle on 34th Street” (1947); “A Christmas Carol” (1951); and “White Christmas” (1954).

Those are all great movies. But what about the spiritually inspired cinematic manifesto of the Great American Dysfunctional Family, “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” (1989)? A film which, over the years, has brought me more joy than nearly anything including most major religions.

Somewhere at the top of my movie list sits “A Christmas Story” (1983). Perhaps because, not unlike the movie’s protagonist, Ralphie, I too grew up among folks who believed no Christmas gift better embodied the True Meaning of Christ’s Birth than an

American-made firearm.

There are also many popular holiday movies which, in my opinion, suck. Such as “Home Alone” (1990). If that kid had been in my house, my mother would’ve wore his butt out. And “Edward Scissorhands” (1990), directed by Tim Burton, the man who ruined “Dumbo” (2019). Or “Gremlins” (1984), a Christmas movie about a horde of malicious demons invading a small town and murdering the townspeople.

Do what?

No holiday movie discussion, however, is complete without mentioning the dozens of stop-motion animated TV movies by Rankin and Bass. These movies are pure childhood. “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” (1964); “Rudolph’s Shiny New Year” (1976); “Rudolph and Frosty’s Christmas” (1979); “Rudolph Develops a Nasal Polyp”, etc.

I’m also a big fan of the multiple retellings of Dickens’ Ebenezer Scrooge. For my money, George C. Scott delivers a prize-winning performance in 1984’s “A Christmas Carol.”

Still, it is the Dickensian musical…