It is only seven hours until Christmas. I am buying a last-minute present for my wife. And apparently I am not alone.

There are males all over this store, crawling on top of each other like hungry grizzly bears. Some men grasp for last-minute gifts in such desperation that they don’t even know which items they’re carrying to the cashier.

I overhear a conversation between a man and his teenage son in the checkout lane:

SON: Dad, I think you grabbed the wrong box.

DAD: What do you mean? This is a robot vacuum for your mom.

SON: That’s a deep fryer.

DAD: Well I’ll be a [non-family-friendly word].

While I wait in line, I read a magazine article entitled “The War on Christmas.” The article is about whether it’s culturally correct to say “Merry Christmas,” or “Happy holidays.” And don’t even get the article started on “God bless you.”

As it happens, most of the article’s multicultural experts say that these holiday phrases are non-offensive just as long as you never say them, write them, read them, or think them.

Another expert

recommends using neutral alternative Christmas greetings in public such as, “Merry winter,” or, “Happy Solstice,” or “Here’s my wallet, ma’am, please don’t be offended.” So in other words,—and this is a classic example of today’s journalism—huh?

So I put the magazine down.

You should see the males in this store. They are going totally ape for gifts. There are hundreds of men elbowing each other, racing, panicking, and in some cases, biting.

An older man in my checkout line says, “This is madness, isn’t it?”

I smile at him and answer “Merry Solstice, sir.”

He frowns. “Merry what?”

He’s a nice guy. Tall. White hair. Slender. We have a conversation. He tells me his wife died six years ago. They were supposed to retire and do some intensive traveling in an RV. But ever since she died,…

I am at my sister’s house. Our families are having an early Christmas. Kids are running around barefoot. Music is playing. Family pictures are everywhere. Chocolates. Cookies. Meatballs. My mother roasted some some nuts. My wife cooked fifty pounds of egg casserole.

I see an old picture of myself on a side table. I am maybe four years old in the photo. God, I looked like a little goober. Thankfully, I am all grown up now and have blossomed into a much bigger goober.

On my sister’s Christmas tree hangs a homemade ornament. I made this ornament when I was in preschool. My mother sees me looking at it. She smiles because she is happy to have her family in one place today.

She says, “My cup runneth over.”

Which is a cheesy phrase I never really understood. When someone says this, it means they’re supposedly happy. But if my cup were runnething all over the place, I’d tell the bartender to bring me a new one.

I remember the first Christmas after my

father died when I was a child. There were no overflowing cups. Nobody felt like celebrating. Still, somehow my mother managed to put up a tree.

This felt pointless. Why? That was my main question. Who gave a rip about Christmas when we weren’t sure what was going to happen to our family? My father had just removed himself from the world. We were a local charity case.

Don’t get me wrong, people are very nice when you go through something bad. But people can only be so nice without getting weird. After a while, you’re tired of weird people.

All you want is for everything to go back to the way it was. You want your dead father to burst through the door and say, “Surprise! I’m alive! It was all a joke!”

But getting back to my story. On this particular Christmas, my mother…

About twenty years ago, Luís wanted a miracle at Christmas. He wanted Jessica to fall in love with him. The only problem was, in Luís’s own words:

“I was a big dork.”

Hey, it happens to the best of us. Many of us spend half our lives being dorks. Though Luís believes he was a dork simply because when it came to ideas for winning Jessica he had none.

Luís was Jessica’s friend. They weren’t close, but they were casual pals. Sometimes he would give her rides home after work. He took her out to the movies occasionally, but that was pretty much it.

“Somehow,” says Luís, “I felt like I had become her brother. I was stuck in the friend zone.”

This is not uncommon for people whose DNA comes from Dorkish descent. Luís was experiencing what many of us dorks have suffered before. Namely, Luís wanted Jessica to see him the way many women might see George Clooney or Leonardo DiCaprio. Instead, she viewed him as Norm from “Cheers.”

But everyone has to start somewhere. So that’s what Luís did. He developed a plan.

This romantic plan was called “Operation Woo Her.”

Luís’s thinking was: “Hey, if I’m gonna ask Jessica to be my girlfriend, I’m gonna go all out. If I fail, I’m failing BIG TIME.”

It was a plan of dork-like proportions, a little juvenile, very off-the-wall, but romantic nonetheless. Here was his plan:

Late one night, Luís would arrive on Jessica’s lawn with a mariachi band. He would sing a Spanish song until either his lungs popped or Jessica agreed to bear his children. I asked Luís where he got this level headed idea.

“My mom is Mexican,” he said.

Luís goes on, “All the leading guys on her Mexican soap operas sing to girls outside their windows, and it always works on TV.”

Always.

The only problem was—and this was just a minor issue—Luís…

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…

It’s a few days until Christmas, and I was going to write something else. I was going to write a story about my dog, or something about winter. But I’ve changed my mind.

That’s a writer’s prerogative. A writer changes his mind all the time.

Sometimes, for instance, he changes his mind at a restaurant, mid-salad.

But today, I wanted to tell you something important. And I’m not changing my mind about this.

I hope you have a merry Christmas.

That’s it. That’s the purpose of this column. In fact, that will probably be my final sentence when it’s all over. So, you can stop reading here if you’re pressed for time.

Still, because I have a few hundred words left, I am going stretch this out. After all, if writers didn’t expound on topics, all suspense novels would only have two pages, and go like this:

“There was a guy who turned up dead. Blah, blah, blah. It was Colonel Mustard in the parlor. The end.”

And who wants to read books like that?

So let me tell you about a kid I

once knew:

There was once a kid who wanted to write. Sometimes, it seemed like he was no good at it. But that’s where you came in. You told him he could do it.

You took different forms, but you’re more or less the same person. You’re kindness. Charity. Goodness. You are every nice person that kid ever met.

You are the man in Piggly Wiggly who returned the kid’s wallet. You didn’t have to do that, but you did.

And you’re the man in Montgomery, who bought the kid and his wife a tank of gas when their credit card was declined at the pump.

You were the person who befriended the kid. You didn’t try to “help” the kid. You just let him talk.

And, you were the college professor who actually took the…

There’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for why I attended a yoga class, five days before Christmas. I’m married. When you are a married man, you find yourself doing all kinds of things you never thought you would do. Taking showers is only one example.

As a married man, you are expected to fold laundry, take out the trash, clip your toenails every February, eat your vegetables, air up the tires, and sometimes attend coed wedding showers held in living rooms containing a lot of estrogen.

This is the marriage deal. You do things that no sober man would ever do.

So before my wife dragged me to yoga class she said I should wear a pair of “flexible athletic” pants. The only problem was, I don’t own a pair of flexible athletic pants. I don’t see why anyone would own a pair of flexible athletic pants when they could own a stiff pair of real pants. So I wore old sweatpants.

Right when I walked through the door, people could tell that this was my first

yoga class. The yoga instructor just smiled when I came in and she said, “First time, huh?”

“How’d you know?” I said.

“You don’t have a yoga mat.”

The first thing anyone should know before they take a yoga class is that they’re going to need to buy a qualified yoga mat that has been approved by an actual yoga instructor, physical therapist, or Whole Foods Market employee. I don’t have any yoga mats for the same reason I don’t have any flexible athletic pants.

So the instructor gave me a complimentary mat that was pink with lotus flowers on it and a printed phrase which read:

“Good vibes only.”

This was our instructor’s favorite go-to phrase. She’d say this whenever she became frustrated with a studio full of ten pear-shaped middle-aged students who were no more capable of touching our toes than we…

My wife and I arrived in Charleston on a chilly December afternoon to celebrate our honeymoon, years ago. The city was decorated for Christmas. Garland hung from each balcony, lamppost, stray dog, and politician. We rolled into town listening to “Danny’s Song” on my truck radio.

The song goes:

“Even though we ain’t got money,
“I’m so in love with you honey…”

Nobody can hear this song and not sing along. Not even hardened war criminals can restrain themselves from humming with Kenny Loggins when he breaks into the chorus.

Anyway, Charleston is an immaculate place. And charming. To small-town folks, the city can almost seem intimidating. This is especially true if you are like me and the most cultured city you’re familiar with is, for instance, Dothan.

People kept telling us that Charleston is the second most historic city in the world (Rome, Italy, is the first). They said this wherever we went. Even at the Waffle House where our waitress was a tired woman with the personality of a boiled ham.

She said, “Did

you know we’re the second most historic city in the world?”

“No, I didn’t know that.”

“You will when you see how much things cost.”

So you can imagine how exhilarating it was to learn all the history that has happened within the city. We were constantly pointing and shouting, “Hey! George Washington slept in THAT building!”

Or, “Hey! Garth Brooks walked his Shih Tzu on THAT grassy lawn!”

Or, “Hey! Thomas Jefferson used to buy his lottery tickets and cigarettes at THAT convenience store!”

The city has a very uppity feel. Average residents of Charleston dress to the nines, even when they check the mail. Wherever we were, it seemed like everyone was wearing pearls, chenille, and high heels. And that was just the men.

Downtown we saw the Gullah women weaving sweetgrass baskets. Most of these women were sitting beside large…

I almost didn’t write this because I swore I’d never tell anyone what I’m about to tell you. But I have to.

A few weeks ago I received a letter postmarked from Nunavut, Canada. An invitation said that I had been selected along with a few other writers for an exclusive, one-on-one interview with a very important person who wears a red suit and owns a lot of reindeer and is not Oprah Winfrey.

The next day, I was on a plane from Hartsfield-Jackson Airport, flying to Milwaukee Mitchell International Airport. Our plane landed in a bunch of Midwestern gray snow. And I mean a bunch of snow.

Milwaukee was as cold as a witch’s underwire. I don’t know why anyone would choose to live in Milwaukee in the winter. Which brings up a joke my mother’s friend Judy, from Milwaukee always tells:

“What do you call a good looking man on the streets of Milwaukee?” “Frozen to death.”

So the layover wasn’t too bad. Neither were my other connecting flights to Tacoma,

British Columbia, and Fairbanks International Airport.

When I reached Alaska, things were touch-and-go. I caught a commuter flight to Deadhorse Airport, near Prudhoe Bay—which is basically the edge of the world where the temperature drops to forty below zero sometimes.

The next commuter plane was piloted by a Norwegian guy named Arvid who, while we were flying through a heavy blizzard, remarked, “I have never flown in an actual blizzard before.”

So things were going great. When we finally touched down, Arvid made the Sign of the Cross, and I changed my trousers.

We were on the remote Fosheim Peninsula at a research facility on Ellesmere Island. This facility has been continuously manned since 1947 and was covered in about ten feet of snowdrift. But the men who run the place are very friendly. Which is remarkable considering they are isolated from modern civilization and most of…

I was maybe ten or eleven. I was invited to try out for the Christmas community choir. A lady visited our church to conduct the auditions.

I had been practicing for three weeks, learning the lyrics to “O Little Town of Bethlehem.”

My father, the welder, took me to the audition after work. Before it was my turn to sing, he gave me a pep talk.

“Knock it outta the park,” he said. “Like Mickey Mantle, you hear?”

I sang for the lady in the wire-rimmed glasses who held the clipboard. She was less than impressed with me.

“Stop singing!” she shouted, interrupting my song. “We’re looking for something else, I’m sorry. Next please?”

My father stormed forward from the back of the church. He looked like he was on his way to pick a fight with an umpire.

“Now wait a minute, Lady,” he said. “I demand you let my boy finish his song. He’s been working on it for weeks. What kind of heartless woman doesn’t let a kid finish his song?”

The woman’s mouth dropped open.

She looked at my father like he’d lost his mind.

She sat down and asked me to sing it again. I cleared my throat. I sang. I did much better than before. It wasn’t a home run, per se, but more like line drive to centerfield.

I got the part.

I was fifteen feet tall. Until that day I’d never done anything special with my life—unless you counted the noises I could make with my armpits. I was a chubby kid with awkward features, I was neither handsome, nor athletic.

But now I was a soloist.

It took months of preparation to get it right. Each day after school, I would rehearse for my mother in the kitchen while she made supper.

On the night of the performance, my father arrived home an hour late. He wheeled into our driveway, kicking…

I am on our porch, which is lit up with little Christmas lights. My two dogs are asleep on my feet, creating smells powerful enough to bring a tear to a glass eye.

Across the road there is a family who is gathered on their porch too. They have even more lights than we do. Someone on their porch plays a guitar using the musical finesse of a tablesaw. And there is singing.

It’s hard not to sing along because they’re playing Christmas music.

This is Florida, and it never truly feels like Christmas in this mild weather. We live in the woods. One mile from the bay. Two miles from the Gulf of Mexico. I am sandwiched between two large bodies of humidity.

Where my house sits was once a swamp. We have longleaf pines, lots of hanging moss, mosquitoes the size of Chevy Impalas, scorpions, spiders, gators, water moccasins, coral snakes, rattlesnakes, pythons, vipers, and real estate developers.

Our scenery is not exactly fit for a Christmas postcard. But the music coming from the porch makes

it almost feel like it.

I eavesdrop on my neighbors.

A young boy says, “Granddaddy, can we play that one song about Grandma getting killed by reindeer?”

Granddaddy launches into “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.” A real classic.

I hear a teenage girl say, “I love that song.”

An old woman’s voice says, “Well your grandmother doesn’t.”

Granddaddy takes a break. He sets the guitar down and he starts talking to the kids. He’s not saying anything important, just jawing the way that old men do.

He has a gentle tenor voice that’s perfect for telling stories about life before technology. Back when people still listened to the radio. When Tommy Dorsey, Guy Lombardo, and the immortal Louis Armstrong still played real music.

Sometimes I wonder what happened to music like that.

I hear the teenage girl say, “Can you…