MILTON—This is your quintessential West Floridian small town. It is bordered by the Blackwater River, with a cute mainstreet, and a great catfish joint. My hometown is about an hour east of here.

If you want to understand our culture in the Panhandle, you visit a place like Milton, Crestview, or DeFuniak Springs. If you want sixty-story condos with tennis courts, go thirty miles south until you see the Red Lobster restaurants and jet-ski rentals.

Tonight we’re doing a Christmas show at the historic Imogene Theatre in downtown Milton. By “we,” I mean my friends. There will be a band, a choir, and me. I don’t expect many people in the audience tonight because, like I said, this is a small town.

It’s forty minutes until showtime. My wife is with me backstage. She’s trying to stay upbeat because she knows small crowds can be discouraging. Sometimes with a tiny crowd it feels like you’re performing onstage at your own funeral reception.

I ask one of the stagehands, “Do you expect anybody to actually come to this show

tonight?”

The man just shrugs and says, “This is Milton,” as if this explains everything.

The bluegrass band arrives. Blue Mullet is what they call themselves. They tune their instruments and take the stage for soundcheck. I can’t help but notice they look perfect, playing in this antique room.

Behind them is a Vaudevillian backdrop—hand painted from the 1920s. The floorboards are heart pine, the brass chandeliers look original, the balcony railing is painted white.

The band plays to the empty theater before the doors open. The fiddle player is making his instrument whine. The upright bassist is “slapping the old doghouse.” The mandolinist sings into a snuff-tin microphone.

I am in the wings, watching with one of the maintenance men.

“You know,” he says, “Hank Williams played in this room.”

“He did?”

“Yep. So did Roy Acuff and Minnie Pearl.”

“No…

There she is. Yeah, it’s definitely her.

I haven’t seen her in years. She’s standing in the produce aisle of the supermarket, scooping mixed walnuts and pecans into a bag.

Nat King Cole Christmas music plays overhead. It smells like Santa Claus’ aftershave in this grocery store.

She couldn’t possibly remember me. I was the quiet man in the rear of her speech class. I was one of her adult community-college students who lurked in the back rows.

Like most in her class, I was petrified of public speaking. So were my peers.

My first speech was one I’d like to forget. I delivered a torturous five-minute monologue on the proper way to prepare Pop Tarts.

When I finished, she gave a smile that seemed to say, “I hate my life.”

I was an adult male with two jobs, a wife, and a back surgery. I tried my best in her class. And she rewarded me for it.

I’ll never forget her for that.

My classmate, Gary, was a lot like me. He worked menial jobs, he had daughters, bills. We complained

in the breezeway before classes together.

Gary had a stutter—a crippling condition that embarrassed him. Simple conversation was difficult, sometimes almost impossible. Finishing a sentence could take ten minutes.

And when she paired students for final projects, she placed us together.

We worked on our speeches one evening at a sports bar. We set up shop in a booth on a Saturday night and watched the Alabama-Georgia game while scribbling speech notes on paper.

Gary purposed we make our speeches on the crisis facing modern paternity in a national economic holocaust.

“Yawn,” said I. “Let’s speak about baseball, America’s greatest pastime, or stock-car racing, or the ever-elusive, yet highly-documented and indisputably-real Bigfoot.”

We finally agreed on writing about our parents. I don’t remember much else that night, except that our notebooks had beer-stains.

And: Alabama lost to Georgia,…

The last thing anyone wants to do in cold weather is deal with self-centered, rambunctious, barnyard pigs. At least that’s what Gayle tells me.

Try to imagine this scene: Gayle is standing in a hog pen, wearing her nightgown, slippers, and a winter coat, swinging a garden rake at a bunch of pigs. Why, you might ask?

Let me back up.

Earlier that morning, Gayle’s neighbor Rob was feeding his pigs. The excited pigs acted like they hadn’t eaten in a decade—even though Rob had fed them hours earlier. They rammed Rob against the fence.

They knocked him down and trampled his leg. He screamed. And he discovered he’d broken his leg and couldn’t walk.

Luckily Rob had his cellphone. He called Gayle, his closest neighbor, while he was lying in the mud. He barely knew her, but she was closer than a hospital.

Gayle answered the phone. “Hello?”

“Hi, Gayle,” he said. “It’s your neighbor, Rob.”

“Hi, Rob, what’s up?”

Rob, lying in the mud, glanced at the greedy pigs, eating slop over his limp and lifeless body. “Oh, not much,” he said. “What have

you been up to lately?”

“Not much. How are you?”

“Can’t complain. Hey listen, are you busy?”

At the time, she was babysitting her daughter’s children. She was making breakfast, baking cookies, doing grandma things.

“A little busy,” she said. “Why?”

“No reason,” he said. “I’ve broken my leg and I think I’m dying.”

She threw the kids into the truck, then raced to Rob’s house. She found him lying in the pen, covered in muck.

“I don’t know how Gayle did it,” Rob explains. “I thought I was hallucinating, I mean here comes this crazy lady in a nightgown, fighting pigs with a garden rake, lifting me into the truck all by herself.”

But Gayle’s not crazy. Not technically. She was a fifty-seven-year-old, independent, and tough woman. She’d survived one husband and raised…

A trailer park. I am sixteen. I am a dummy. Lots of sixteen-year-old boys are. Today, there are three dummies here to help Johnnie Miller’s mother decorate her trailer for Christmas.

His mother goes all out for Christmas even though his house is—how should I put this?—a dump. It’s an ugly, brown, sixty-foot mobile home, with a rusted roof, and a hot water heater in the backyard.

She has lights, giant lawn figurines, a plastic Santa with reindeer. She owns a lifetime’s worth of Christmas junk, and her collection only seems to grow each year. Johnnie has been putting up these decorations each December since he was old enough to sprout armpit hair. This year he’s recruited help.

We boys climb on ladders. We deck the halls and decorate every square inch of the ugly house. The windows, trim, gutters, eves, porch posts, even the steps.

And his mother doesn’t use modern Christmas lights. These are the kind from 1951, with thick bulbs and aluminum wiring you often hear about on the evening news. (“And in

local news tonight, a sixteen-year-old boy electrocuted from faulty Christmas lights, police used fingerprints to identify the melted body. Back to you, Lisa.”)

Johnnie and I and two other boys are working from noon until night. And after several hours of work, it occurs to one of us: “Hey! Why doesn’t your mom just leave the decorations up year round?”

Johnnie’s mother overhears this. She is standing on the lawn, smoking a cigarette.

“It ruins the excitement,” she says. “There’s nothing special about decorations if you leave them up.”

She is older than other mothers. She has white hair, she looks like she’s lived a hard life. Her voice is like a tuba, and she always wears embroidered sweatshirts.

We work on the house until dark. We are ready to go home because we think we’re finished. But we discover that we aren’t even…

When you were a kid, December was your favorite month. It was the best month of all. There was magic in the air in December. You knew this because there were hundreds of cheesy television advertisements telling you about “the magic of Christmas.”

Which was easy to believe because when you’re a kid everything is magic. Your entire life is about fairytales, cowboys, international spies, firing cap guns, or galloping around on a stick-horsey.

But one day you got older and realized you were mistaken about the magic of life. Real life was about a lot more than stick-horseys.

Real life was rough. Real life was having your tonsils ripped out with medieval salad tongs by a family doctor who smelled like Old Spice and Lucky Strikes.

Also, real life was about the monkey bars, a good game of tag, or kisses from girls.

In grade school, you weren’t sure how life suddenly became about kissing girls, but everyone was getting kisses, so you thought, “Hey, why not?”

Then something went wrong.

Somehow you ended up with not just one, but TWO girlfriends—Katie and Gladys.

You’d get a kiss from Katie in the morning, and one from Gladys in the afternoon. Soon, the girls got into a fight, with bloody noses and everything. This would be the only time in your life when two girls would ever fight over you. So you tried very hard to enjoy the magic of it.

Time marched forward. Eventually, you learned that life was not about kisses, but trees. Big ones, tall ones with lots of limbs. You climbed these trees, one at a time. Until one day you were picking mulberries from one and you fell.

You landed on your shoulder. You were certain it was broken, but your mother declared that it was not. Which was a rotten deal because when Fred Thompson broke his arm he lived like the king of…

DEAR SANTA:

I feel a little silly writing you. Recently, I wrote a column about how when I was a boy I always wanted you to bring me a cowboy hat. A silver-belly colored Stetson. A few days later, one showed up on my porch from an anonymous person. I almost couldn’t believe it.

I know it was you, Santa.

If only I would have had the foresight to write a column about a summerhouse on the beach with a four-car garage instead.

No. I’m only kidding. Please realize that I am only making a joke, Santa. A three-car garage would be more than plenty.

Anyway, the words “thank you” don’t even begin to cover how I feel. The hat fits perfectly, and I have been wearing it for the last three days. I even wore the hat—this is true—to the grocery store. I almost never wear hats indoors, but I did yesterday.

The cashier referred to me as “Tex.” I asked her to kindly call me “Roy” instead.

She said, “Who’s Roy?”

“Roy Rogers.”

“Wait, does he sing that

song about the Gambler?”

You have to worry about our nation’s youth.

But the truth is I feel so silly, Santa. I didn’t NEED a hat. There are so many other important things happening in the world. Things that are WAY more pressing than my headwear. I feel so ridiculously selfish wearing this beautiful thing.

When I was a boy, I asked you for a hat like this every single year and I never got one. And I was okay with that. Because I knew you had bigger fish to fry. I understood this.

Once, my friend Billy explained it all to me when I was nine. He said that you only had a certain amount of space in your sleigh and you had to pack small gifts. A hat just wasn’t practical. And you’re practical guy.

Looking back, this…

It’s a few minutes until Thanksgiving. I thought I’d stay up and watch the clock change. I’m sipping tea, listening to gentle music playing in the background.

I think it’s Bing Crosby, or maybe Nat King Cole. The volume is too low to tell. Either way, it sounds like 1948 in this living room.

Yesterday, my wife made a batch of cornbread and biscuits. She left them on top the refrigerator so they’d get good and dry before she crumbled them them into cornbread dressing.

There is a big debate between calling it “dressing” or “stuffing.” And while I am no authority on the matter, I can tell you this:

Once, I spent Thanksgiving at a buddy’s house, his mother was from West Virginia, and she served “stuffing.”

She cooked the entire feast without ever dropping the Winston cigarette that dangled from the corner of her mouth. And she must have had a few too many cups of holiday cheer because she accidentally shoved all her cornbread into a well-known orifice of the turkey’s body. I had never seen

this done.

“What have you done to the dressing?” I asked her.

“Dressing?” she said, laughing, elbow-deep in a turkey’s butt. “This ain’t dressing, kid. It’s stuffing.”

You can imagine my surprise when just before serving the turkey, she rammed an extra-long spoon up the bird’s backend and announced, “This stuffing looks a little undercooked, but oh well.”

It was apple-pecan stuffing. Everybody ate some and a few hours later we all got deathly ill. And I don’t mean to get graphic here, but we were having projectile-like symptoms.

And that was the last time I ever ate salmonella-flavored West Virginia stuffing.

Anyway, I’m sorry I brought that up. Especially on Thanksgiving. What I meant to say was that I hope you have a great day. And I really mean that, I’m not just blowing smoke.

I love this holiday. The…