Okay, maybe this isn’t about Christmas, but Christmas is the season for sweetness, so I’m hoping you’ll let me tell a story that fits, even if it’s set so many years earlier in a land that seems ever so far away. There’s a baby in it. It’s short a manger and a posse of shepherds; but I can’t help thinking this little story is related. There must be a thousand stories like this—more, in fact, stories about shady first impressions suddenly turned to gold. Here goes. A woman named Anderson, Mrs. Anderson, was the very first white woman, she says, in the neighborhood of Native people—mostly Dakota. It’s 1854. She has a husband and two darling children—a two-year-old, and a baby. They live—as you can guess—in a log cabin, pretty much all by themselves.