My birthday lands exactly four days after Christmas. This means that, traditionally, I usually receive holiday gifts from family members who smile sweetly as I open presents, saying, “Just to be clear, this is for Christmas AND your birthday.”

It’s hard being born during Christmastime and also not being Jesus. But over the years, I’ve gotten used to having a post-Christmas birthday. In fact, it’s kind of nice having your big day while the whole world is between hangovers.

This birthday was a particularly big one for me. Because as of yesterday, I am now older than my dad was when he died.

I don’t know what it is about kids who lose parents young, but something happens to your childhood brain. The age at which your parent dies becomes the age you never expect to reach. It is as though someone moves the goalposts inward.

Over the years, I’ve talked with people who lost parents as children. They all sort of feel the same way.

Many of them are surprised when “That Age” happens to them.

My dad died when he was 41 years old. Forty-one was That Age for me. Last year, on my birthday, I kept marveling at the fact that I was actually still alive. I stayed up late that night, just to be sure.

And now that I’m even older than my father was, it’s weird.

When someone dies, their image is forever cemented in your mind at the precise moment of their death. And so, in my head, my father is a perpetual 41-year-old. He’s a middle-aged guy, just like me, who doesn’t know jack squat about life.

He’s walking around inside my brain, still living a regular life, still changing the oil every three thousand miles, still shouting at the radio about the importance of relief pitching.

Whenever I think of him, I realize…

Christmas break. There were little-kid toys scattered around the house, fallen in the line of duty.

A friendship bracelet kit, decimated. A loaded whoopee cushion on a chair, awaiting its next victim. A Silly Putty wad, dangling from a light fixture. 

There was a knock-off Stretch Armstrong doll, lying on the coffee table, tired and depressed. I gave the generic-brand stretch doll to my 12-year-old goddaughter for Christmas. Namely, because I had a Stretch Armstrong when I was a kid. 

I’m amazed we survived however, because the other day when I opened the box a warning label said this product contains a chemical known to the state of California to cause birth defects, cancer, and other reproductive harm, etc. 

And I’m thinking about the Christmas breaks of my childhood. I’m remembering the glory of Christmases yore, back before warning labels which caused cancer in California. Back before technology lit the world with its perpetually phosphorus glow. 

Things in America have changed since I was a boy. We were feral children during Christmas

breaks. We were dangerous. We lived without helmets. We had BB guns. We ate saturated fat. And we were never, ever inside. 

After all, there was no reason to be inside. Not if you owned a bike. I spent the first 14 years of my life with a bicycle saddle digging into my main crevice. 

If we weren’t riding bikes, however, we were likely in the woods, building campfires, making rope swings, or inventing new ways to break Joseph Tyler’s leg. 

We built tree houses, too. I don’t know where we managed to find scrap lumber for such structures, but somehow we always did. Usually, the lumber was warped, waterlogged, and came pre-treated with tetanus. 

We would haul lumber into the woods, climb trees, and use our dads’ hammers, shouting things like, “Keep it plumb!” even though, technically, we had no idea what “plumb” meant.  

Inevitably, the…

“Tell me a story?” said the little girl, crawling into her bed.

The 12-year-old turned back the sheets and fluffed her pillow. This, after she had dutifully brushed her teeth, brushed her hair, and suffered through an elaborate bathroom hygenic routine which required about as much time as it took to complete the Sistine Chapel.

“You want a bedtime story?” I said.

“Yes, please,” she said.

Then, I watched the little girl pause her bedtime regime to connect six various electronic devices to a rat’s nest of 120-volt chargers slithering upon her nightstand. She worked with her electronics so deftly, moving by rote, actuating various buttons, navigating through an impossible tangle of high-voltage cables as efficiently as a 45-year-old IT-support technician. Eventually, her bedside stand was a mass of tiny, blinking indicator LEDs. It takes a lot of electricity to be a modern kid.

“Okay,” she said, diving under the covers. “I’m ready for my story.”

I do not have kids. I know

nothing about children. I am a “guy.” I don’t think about the many unimportant things child-rearing people naturally think about, such as, for instance, lunch.

Thus, whenever our goddaughter comes to visit us, I often feel as clueless as a one-legged cat in a sandbox.

But I DO know how to tell stories. Finally, I was thinking to myself, something I actually know how to do. Because, God knows, I don’t know anything else about the mysteries of girlhood.

Yesterday, for example, we were at Home Depot when the kid announced she had to use the bathroom. I thought, no big deal. Going to the bathroom is a straightforward procedure. I waited outside the restroom for 18 minutes.

I kept calling into the bathroom, saying, “My God, are you blowing up the toilet in there?” Whereupon two elderly women exited the bathroom scowling at me.

So, I…

Christmas supper. The little girl beside me ate ferociously as though she had not eaten in 13 years when in fact she had already eaten two breakfasts, one Christmas lunch, half a bag of tortilla chips, a quarter of a cheese log, and various holiday snacks which all featured onion dip as a main ingredient.

As she ate, she bounced up and down in her seat with excitement. The china cabinet shook beneath each impact.

“You might want eat slower,” I said, watching the child scoop food into her mouth like shoveling coal into a locomotive furnace.

“I can’t slow down,” she said, mouthful. “We have to hurry.”

The girl was eating fast because we HAD to hurry and finish SUPPER because we were exchanging PRESENTS after the MEAL. I’m surprised she didn’t choke on her mac and cheese.

After supper, we all had jobs on my wife’s cleanup crew. My wife doles out kitchen jobs according to skill level and experience. My job,

for example, was transferring leftovers from their respective Tupperware containers into slightly smaller Tupperware containers.

We do this even though the original containers were working just fine because transferring leftovers is a cherished holiday job which accomplishes the very important purpose of not allowing anyone’s husband to watch football.

The little girl’s job was carrying Tupperware containers to the fridge and placing them on shelves. The little girl is blind, but I trust her with this job because she is a very capable young woman, and over the years she has learned our kitchen and knows exactly where to spill things.

Thus, I would hand the child a huge Tupperware bowl of something like boiled okra, whereupon she would take the bowl into both hands, carefully approach the refrigerator, spill the bowl onto the floor, at which point my wife would gaze upon the huge mess and remark, “You…

Joseph and Mary hitchhiked toward Memphis, riding shotgun in a semi-truck.

The truck driver kept looking at Joseph with a distrusting look. Probably because Joseph dressed like a thug. Joseph’s Snoop Dogg T-shirt and tats weren’t helping, either.

The driver let them off at Walmart. The teenage boy helped his girlfriend out of the cab. She was lovely and quiet. Tatted up. And pregnant as could be.

The driver offered Joseph cash. Joseph refused, but the driver insisted.

“Take it,” the driver said. “Your girl needs a coat, it’s below freezing tonight.”

He took the cash, namely because he had no choice. The teenage couple had left home in a hurry. Mary’s dad kicked her out. They were living with Joseph's parents, but his mother despised Mary. “That girl is just using you,” his mother would say.

So here they were in Walmart.

They walked inside the Supercenter. The women’s section didn’t have maternity jackets, so they bought a men’s work coat, double-X, brown, with all the charm of livestock excrement.

“Aren’t you going to buy yourself a coat?” Mary asked.

“I’m okay,” Joseph said.

“But all you’re wearing is a T-shirt.”

Joseph’s scrawny bare arms poked from beneath the sleeves of his Snoop-Dogg shirt. He had no body fat on his tiny frame.

Joseph’s clothes hung off him like a revival tent. He had been working as a commercial framer ever since quitting school during eighth grade. Construction work makes you lean. So does a steady diet of Marlboros and Monster Energy drinks.

They left Walmart, walking a vacant highway shoulder, looking for a place to crash. A Super 8, a Red Roof Inn, maybe a Motel 6. But they found nothing.

Then.

Mary stopped walking. She clutched her belly.

“What’s wrong?” said Joseph.

Mary’s pants were soaked. There was an instant puddle around her feet. “I think I’m having the baby.”

Joseph stuck his thumb out for a…

I’ve been saving this for Christmas Eve.

The story takes place in Auschwitz, 1941. On Christmas morning. It was cold in the concentration camp. Bitterly cold. Most of the prisoners inside were Polish, not Jewish. The Jews wouldn’t arrive until mid-1942.

The Polish prisoners were huddled together that morning, trying to keep from freezing. The temperature was low. There was frost on the ground.

The prisoners were ill equipped for the cold, clothed in striped pajamas made of thin cotton. Some prisoners used strips of torn fabric as makeshift mittens or boots.

Their hands and feet were cut and battered, from manual labor. Their clothes were soiled, from working in muddy trenches. Already, many of the Polish prisoners were suffering from frostbite. Some were dying of pneumonia. The lucky ones had already passed.

This morning, at sunup, their captors had given them a horrible Christmas present. In the roll-call square, the SS had erected a huge Christmas tree overnight. The tree was

decorated with pretty electric lights. But beneath the boughs were the corpses of inmates who had either been worked to death, or had frozen to death.

The inmates saw the bodies of their loved ones, lying there, in contorted positions, with peaceful looks on their frozen faces.

Many prisoners rushed to their loved ones’ remains, but were kicked away. The others just looked on in vapid silence.

One Polish prisoner recalled that this Christmas tree was the Germans’ “present for the living.”

And the hits kept coming. The SS announced to the prisoners that anyone caught mentioning Christmas, even just a little bit, would be killed. They were also prohibited from singing Polish Christmas carols. Forbidden from exchanging trinkets as gifts.

That day, all prisoners were forced to march into the roll-call square, in the biting frost, to listen to a radio address of the Pope’s Christmas Eve…

The young woman emailed me her story. She said she was lonely. She was 32 and single. Her therapist said she was depressed. He suggested medication. Then, her therapist asked whether she had plans for Christmas. She gave a bitter laugh and lit a Marlboro.

“Christmas is just another day,” was her philosophy.

To be fair, she had reason to be depressed. She had relocated to north Alabama for work. She had no friends in this city. Her family lived twelve states away.

Her townhome had no Christmas decorations. What was the point? Who was going to see them? Plus, she was hardly ever home. She spent her life in a cubicle.

Each year, the newly built townhouse neighborhood emptied at Christmas. It was a soulless subdivision. No decor in the yards. Namely, because most of the homes were occupied by young, urban professionals with decent jobs, new cars, and rooms full of crappy Ikea furniture.

Every Christmas, it was a mass exodus. The residents all packed up their late-model SUVs and vacated to their

hometowns.

But the girl was still home. In this vacant neighborhood. This anemic housing complex. Sort of like living on an empty movie set.

A few days before Christmas, she saw an old man walking his dog. Her neighbor. He was a widower, that was all she knew about him. She was on her front stoop, smoking, when he passed her home.

“Hi,” she said.

He gave her a nod and a smile.

Together they watched his little Yorkie waddle around the frozen grass, locked in a half squatting pose, caught in the painful throes of constipation. The Yorkie’s name was Buddha. Currently, little Buddha was having a difficult time finding the much needed relief of enlightenment.

“Are you having a nice Christmas?” the old man asked.

Shrug. “Christmas is just some other day.”

He smiled.

The conversation was brief. They bid each other goodbye…

Thank you. That is the​ purpose of this column. I want to say “thanks.” I don't know you, but I believe in the good you do.

In public, I used to see you sometimes and think to myself: "I wish someone would thank them." But I never do because if I did, you’d think I was a complete nut job.

Maybe I am a nut job. But I’m allowed to be that way. After all, I am a columnist—sort of—and that means my proverbial box is missing a few crayons.

Long ago, I used to deliver newspapers with my mother. We used to deliver to a fella who would answer the door in pajamas. He had messy hair and a bushy white beard. He always gave me a five-dollar tip.

He was generous. If he wasn’t home one day, he would pay me ten bucks the next day. He was a columnist, my mother told me. And that’s why he was such a weirdo in weird pajamas. Even his house smelled weird.

I suppose I

ought to thank him while I am at it.

Also, thanks to the man I saw in the gas station who bought a lottery scratch-off ticket. Who won thirty bucks, then turned around and gave the cash to a woman behind him in line. What a guy.

The woman thanked him in a language that sounded like Russian. The man thanked her back using fluent hand gestures.

Thank you, Cindy—the woman who translated one of my speeches in American Sign Language for the front row​. She told me I talked very fast and now she has problems with her rotator cuff.

She also taught me how to cuss in sign language.

Thank you to the seventy-year-old man who went back to school to get his GED. And his forty-six-year-old daughter, who tutored him.

And you. You deserve thanks, but you don't always get it. In…

Christmas Eve. Southeastern Kansas. The middle of nowhere.

Kansas is one of those places that gets a bad rap. People speak of Kansas like it’s Death Valley, or the hindparts of Mars.

People say stuff like, “Yeah, I drove through Kansas once, I was bored spitless for six hours.”

But that’s only because they aren’t seeing the Sunflower State the right way. The Thirty-Fourth State can bewitch you if you open yourself to its quiet beauty.

First you have the sunsets. Kansan sunsets are neon red and gold, vivid enough to put Claude Monet to shame. The sundowns are an ecological phenomenon, caused by red dust in the atmosphere which has traveled all the way from the Sahara to suspend itself above Bourbon and Neosho County.

Also, you have sublime flatness. Millions of Americans visit the Gulf of Mexico each year to stare at prairie-flat blueness. Kansans have a gulf of their own.

Currently, the state has 15.8 million acres of virgin prairie. You can stand at certain places in this state and,

literally, be hundreds of miles from the nearest Super Target.

In the wintertime, however, Kansas has earth-stopping blizzards. This is the geographical center of the nation. They get all the weather you didn’t want.

Tornadoes. Fatal summers. Snowstorms harsh enough to make Scandinavia look like a weekend in Honolulu.

It was during one such snowstorm, on Christmas Eve, that Marie was at home. She was a young mother, with two children. They lived in a 40-foot single wide, perched on 200 acres of family land.

The blizzard of aught-nine was apocryphal. Many evangelicals believed this was the literal end of the world and were sincerely repenting of their evil ways, committing themselves to prayer, fasting, and self flagellation. Meanwhile, the German Catholics decided to take up vodka as hobby.

To say the storm was “bad” is like saying invasive dental surgery is “kinda fun.” In some places…

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.…