Today’s storyMonroeville, AL
At Christmas, the gift that helped change American literature wasn’t wrapped like treasure. It was an envelope, small enough to hold in one hand, and large enough to give a tired writer back her…
Yigo, GU
Out over the blue Pacific, Christmas sometimes arrives with a parachute and a thump, dropped from the back of a C-130 toward islands with no loading dock and no big-box store in sight.
Muskegon, MI
The first Snurfer was not born in a factory or a stadium. It began with the scrape of skis, the squeak of a rope, and the kind of snowy Michigan yard where a child can turn a small hill into a whole…
Grand Forks, ND
Before it was a familiar box in American cupboards, Cream of Wheat began as a pale, grainy handful of possibility in a worried flour mill.
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Bentonville, AR
A grass skirt on Wall Street is not what people expected from a famously frugal Arkansas businessman. Add a lei, a public hula, and a promise kept, and the financial district had itself a very…
Bynum, MT
The bones were the opposite of showy: small enough to miss, easy to overlook, the kind of fossils that could sit quietly in a box while bigger dinosaur dreams stomped past.
Cheraw, SC
The trumpet bell was supposed to point straight ahead, neat and obedient, but after one Manhattan party it looked as if it had spotted something interesting on the ceiling.
Onward, MS
Before the teddy bear was tucked into cribs or propped on Valentine’s Day shelves, it was tied to a tree in the Mississippi woods.
Loveland, CO
The envelopes came for the name first: Loveland. Before ink pads and special verses, people were already sending valentines to a Colorado town because the postmark sounded like a wink.
Seligman, AZ
Before children knew Radiator Springs, there was the smell of aftershave in Seligman, Arizona, and the soft snip-snip of scissors near a highway that never seemed to stop moving.
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