The manger was made of cardboard. It was stuffed with fresh hay. Genuine hay from the hardware store. The Christchild was a naked Cabbage Patch doll from Brianna Smith’s personal collection. Orange yarn for hair. Jesus was a redhead.

Joseph was a tall kid with a long neck. You could see his blue jeans poking beneath the hem of his brown robe.

The shepherds were perpetually giggling about something. Nobody knew what about. But then, it was best just to let them go. It was fruitless for Miss Rhonda to tell them not to laugh. Whenever you tell kids not to laugh, they laugh so hard they pee themselves.

There were fruits and vegetables present at the birth of Christ that year, too. The vegetable costumes were leftovers from VBS. The cucumbers and tomatoes and summer squashes all knelt to offer their genuflection.

The angels were few. Dressed in white robes. Wings made of coat hangers and muslin. Three of them were brothers, and they were anything but haloed children. The eldest

had gotten into a fight on the playground over a GI Joe and knocked out a kid’s front teeth.

The wisemen were dressed in gold lame and purple velvet. They wore paper crowns on their heads, courtesy of the local Burger King. They came bearing gifts.

One of the magi carried an antique box from his mother’s house. Another of the magi carried a porcelain vase that belonged to his grandmother. The third wiseman carried a cornflower blue Corningware dish because his mother misunderstood the instructions.

Thus, that particular year, Jesus received gold, frankincense, and casserole.

We in the choir were dressed in white robes. Although we weren’t angels. Miss Rhonda made this clear whenever she addressed us. We were Heavenly Hosts. Whatever that was. Our job was, however, very important. We were to sing “Gloria! An exchange is dou-ble!”

But the star of the show that year…

“In prison,” said Charlie, “all you want is to know someone loves you.”

Charlie had been inside for 22 years. Nobody ever came to visit at Christmas. Never. Not even once. Sometimes he wondered if anyone remembered him.

Usually, Charlie’s Christmas consisted of going to the chow hall—it was the only time of year when the kitchen actually made an effort to give you decent food.

A lot of the guys just hung out in the TV rooms, watching the NBA. Others drank prison hooch. Some just stayed in their cells and stared at the walls.

Christmas morning in prison is quiet. Uneventful. For most, it is a reminder of how crappy your life is. How forgotten you are. Another calendar day.

Families rarely visit inmates on Christmas. What would you rather do on Christmas? Stay home and eat ham? Or get dressed and go to the clink for visiting hours?

Most guys inside don’t see any family members unless they’re locked up with them.

But this Christmas morning was different. They woke Charlie and told him he had

visitors.

“Visitors?” said Charlie.

“Get dressed,” said the guard. “They’re already here, waiting for you.”

“Who is?”

“You’ll see.”

Who could be visiting? Charlie had gone inside when he was in his 30s. He was in his 50s now. His frame was gaunt. His hair was white. The other inmates called him “Pops.”

The guard led him to the visiting area. They called the visiting area the “dance floor.” You only went to the dance floor, if you were lucky. Most guys never got to go.

If you were, however, taken to the dance floor, you lived like royalty. You ate from vending machines. You could play around with your kids—if you had any. And you felt like a human being for a little while.

Charlie followed the guard to the dance floor with a lump of clay in his throat.…

The story came to me early in my writing career. I visited a nursing home, looking for a Christmas story for a small magazine I was writing for. The magazine had a circulation of 1.6 people. At the nursing home, I met a woman named Shirley.

“There were three of us,” Shirley began.

Three young women, in their twenties. Three department store clerks. All three mothers. The year was 1942. The place was South Carolina.

America was in rough shape. The Depression had only been over a few years. The world was at war. Everyone’s husband was shipping off to fight Hitler. There were going to be a lot of widows in this country.

The three clerks lived on tight budgets. Enlisted-man pay was garbage. Their kids would not be getting much for Christmas this year, because money was short. The three women barely earned enough at their jobs to afford much more than their children’s supper and clothing. A lot of beans and weenies were consumed in their households.

It was December. The

department store was packed. They were working overtime. Customers were Christmas shopping.

One of the three young women noticed a boy wandering the store. He was maybe 12. He was behaving conspicuously. The kid had something hidden beneath his jacket. Something bulky.

The boy was shoplifting.

“Should we call the store detective?” said Shirley.

“No,” said Eleanor. “Look at his shoes, they're full of holes. We can’t get that poor boy arrested.”

“What should we do?” said Ethel.

They didn’t know what to do. So they followed him. Well, technically only Shirley followed him. She tailed him through town. She followed him home. She discovered that he’d stolen a dictionary. And also, a cookbook. Betty Crocker. Along with a couple of baby dolls.

Shirley watched the boy enter a rundown shotgun house. She watched him climb dry rotted stairs into the squalid dwelling, as his little…

Merry Christmas, Layla Grace. I got your name from the church Christmas tree. It’s kind of like Angel Tree, where you buy gifts for kids whose names are on the tree.

Your card was hanging on the branch when I was walking through the lobby. I was talking to people, shaking hands, and that’s when I noticed your photograph hanging there.

You are so pretty. Your hair is the same color as mine. Red. God help you.

When I saw your picture, I thought to myself, she looks like she’d make someone a very good friend. So I lifted your card from the tree and inspected it. And I fell in love with you.

For starters, I really like the name Layla. It’s a good name. I had an aunt named Layla. She smelled like old-lady perfume and her couch was covered in plastic. But she was very nice. And sometimes she babysat me. My mother was always reminding me to behave for Aunt Layla, and not to stress her out because she had IBS.

Your second name, Grace, is also a wonderful name, for obvious reasons. Also, I don’t know if you know this, but the letters in Layla Grace can be rearranged to spell “Lycra Algae.”

So this has to be a sign.

The card said your mother is in prison, your dad died from an overdose. You have not met either of them. You live in foster care. A group home. An orphanage, basically. You’re 7 years old. Your favorite food is ice cream.

The card also says that you’re sweet, and you like playing with dolls. You pretend that you’re their mother. You carry them around, and your foster mom overhears you tell your dolls, “I’ll never leave you, baby.”

So anyway, your Christmas wish list was simple. It was written in your own hand. And may I say, you have superb handwriting.

You wanted kinetic…

A Christmas party. There was a piano in the lobby. I was playing carols while people ate cookies and tossed back drinks. People wore reindeer hats and festive wear. There was a lady in a Grinch mask.

Tonight, sitting beside me on the piano bench was an 11-year-old music critic named Becca.

She was dressed in her nicest Christmas clothes. Red satin pants. Puffy black blouse. Ribbon in her hair. She was squeezed as close to me as she could get. Becca is blind.

“I wish I knew what you looked like,” she said, while I played “Winter Wonderland.” I was playing the part about naming the snowman Parson Brown.

“You aren’t missing much,” I said. “I’m not much to look at.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously. I’m redheaded. I’m gangly. I have a big nose.”

“And you smell like dogs.”

“So they say.”

Becca and I are close friends. I met her a little over a year ago. I cannot explain how we became so close. Or why. But there you are.

I do not have any other 11-year-old friends. And I can honestly say,

I did not expect to have an 11-year-old pal. But sometimes these things just happen.

Becca started spending weekends at our house. She began going on the road with me, sometimes performing with me at shows. Then we became her legal godparents. It all happened so fast. And now I can’t remember what my life was like before her.

I played “Let it Snow.”

“You’re my best friend,” she said, mid-song.

“You’re mine, too.”

“Seriously?” she said.

“Seriously.”

She leaned into me. “Seriously-seriously?”

Yes. In fact, I wish I could tell this girl how much she means to me. I wish I could tell her that this year, before my wife and I left the country, we had a will drawn up—just in case the Delta airline pilots had a crappy day. We have no heirs, and…

No crying. That was the stipulation. A few years ago, I visited the pediatric oncology wing at the hospital and I promised not to cry. Namely, because in a place like this crying doesn’t help anyone. So I kept a stiff upper lip.

I walked to the nurse’s desk. Checked in. They took me to the kid’s room. He was lying on a hospital bed, dressed in Christmas PJs. He wore a Santa hat over his bald head. He was going to be having surgery today.

“Are you Sean?” said the kid.

“I’ve been called worse,” I said.

“You’re my favorite writer.”

“You need to raise your standards.”

“My mom and I read your stories. First thing in the mornings, when she’s drinking coffee.”

“What are you usually drinking?” I asked.

“Gatorade.”

I sat beside his bed. The boy had a tube running up his nostrils. He asked if I wanted to play video games. I’m not a video game guy. I didn’t grow up with video games. When I was a kid, a boy in our county had the game “Pong,” and it

was broke.

So I watched the boy play his video game. He was getting into it. Explosions on the screen. Lots of gunfire. It was a loud game.

Finally, he handed me the controller. “You try.”

“I’m not a game player.”

“I can show you.”

So he showed me. He tried to teach an uncoordinated middle-aged guy the ins and outs. The child seemed to take pleasure in how truly awful I was.

Finally, I handed him the controller and said, “I think it’s best if I just watch.”

So that’s what happened. For almost an hour I sat there and watched him play. Eventually, we were interrupted when a few nurses came in and informed me that he was about to be prepped for surgery.

His mother and I were asked to leave the room.

I was 15 years old. I walked into the rural library. My father was freshly dead. I was a middle-school dropout. We were poor. It was Christmastime.

The small, public library was decorated for the holiday season. There was plastic holiday crapola everywhere. It was cold outside. I had no winter coat.

I stepped into the library with a blast of sleet and rain. I was wearing a T-shirt. My hair was soaked.

“Where’s your coat?” said the librarian.

“I don’t have one.”

“You don’t have a coat!? It’s 30 degrees outside!”

Shrug.

The librarian’s name was Miss Terry. She was old enough to predate the Roosevelt administration. Her hair was cotton white. Her shoes were Reeboks. Her embroidered sweatshirt read: “Dear Santa, I can explain.”

The library was a converted residential house. And I was a regular here.

“You can’t go around without a coat,” Miss Terry said. “You’ll freeze.”

Shrug Number Two.

I wandered to the fiction section. Fiction was all I was interested in. I read fiction each morning, afternoon, and night. It was escapism, I see that now. And

I was a classic escapist. But then, there were very few happy things in my life. Who wouldn't want to escape?

That day, I checked out two Louis L’Amour books, a few Dick Francis novels. When I brought my selection up to the counter, Miss Terry just looked at me with warm eyes.

“I have a book I want you to read,” she said.

“You do?”

She placed a leatherbound book atop my stack of books. Written by Lucy Maud Montgomery.

“I think you’ll appreciate this one.”

“It looks like a girl book.”

“Try to keep an open mind.”

I took the books home, I read them the way I always read books. Ferociously. But when I read the Lucy Maud Montgomery book, time stood still. And my heart moved sideways in my chest. I had never…

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…

A supermarket checkout line. Cheesy holiday music is playing overhead. Not the fun kind of cheesy music, but the kind once heard in Kmart á la 1973.

There is an old man at the head of our long checkout line, standing at the register. He digs through his pockets, but keeps coming up empty handed.

“I’m sorry, miss,” he says to the cashier. “I must’ve left my wallet at home.”

He is embarrassed, and the young cashier is unsure about what to do.

I am watching this entire exchange closely because I am a columnist who writes human interest stories.

We columnists must keep our observational reflexes honed as sharp as wiffle-ball bats. We have to stay ready because we are not real writers.

Writers are inspired artists and poets. Columnists are factory-line workers who take whatever stories they can get.

Your big-time writer is a person with incredibly poignant things to say about life and the profundity of the human condition; they have grand ambitions of someday winning a major literary award,

and possibly having a “New York Times” best-smeller.

Whereas a columnist’s highest aspiration is for someone to cut his or her column out of the paper and hang it on the refrigerator.

So columnists have to work harder than true writers because we can’t rely on inspiration. Besides, our job is not to be inspired, but to constantly find new stories. This is not simple work. Therefore, most of the time you find me writing about key social issues such as, say, my dogs.

But the beauty of all this is, every once in a while a column will actually fall into your lap.

This is a rare thing indeed, and one of the most precious things that can happen to a stringer of words. Your task as a columnist is to be mindful enough to notice this pivotal moment is occurring, then to ignore it and…