“But you’ll always be home for Christmas, right?” my father would ask whenever discussion turned to not being home for one holiday or another. Among his five children, it was rare for any of us to be any place other than his dining room on major holidays. But eventually school or boyfriends sometimes changed our plans. Click…

Just before Advent, Mom sent me and my siblings out to the field next to our house to pick bunches of the straw that grew there. In the summertime, we would imitate Laura Ingles Wilder in the opening credits of “Little House on the Prairie,” running through the field, falling down and laughing, clutching our…