Santa Claus didn’t use the chimney that Christmas Eve, and he didn’t wait until we all went to sleep. It was 1973 and St. Nicholas was standing in front of me in my grandmother’s house in Big Stone Gap, Virginia. I was three years old.
Mamaw’s house in Powell Valley—nestled in the Jefferson National Forest, along the Trail of the Lonesome Pine—provided the perfect setting for this life-altering yuletide encounter. When I was growing up, my parents and I would drive there from our home in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, traveling on winding roads through little Virginia towns—Fancy Gap, Chilhowie, Abingdon. Christmas music faded in and out on country radio stations.
As an early gift that year, my aunt Nila mailed me a set of pajamas with a red candy-cane stripe. My mother says I wanted to sleep in those PJs every night. Sometimes
