♪ LANI PETERSON: Have you ever noticed, on Thanksgiving Day, at the top of the newspaper, there's a poison control hotline?

(laughter) Did you ever wonder what that's for?

PHIL WYMAN: On Halloween, your kids can dress up scary, knock on the neighbor's door, do weird things, and they say, "Aren't they so cute?"

DIANA VALENTINE: And he said, "Happy New Year, m'lady.

Every year, I kiss a lady for good luck."

And I said, "Do you?"

WES HAZARD: Tonight's theme is "Holiday Surprise."

ANNOUNCER: This program is made possible in part by contributions from viewers like you.

Thank you.

HAZARD: So, our theme tonight is "Holiday Surprise," which I think is pretty apt, because surprise is the one thing that we can count on with holidays.

We know that they're coming every year, literally like clockwork, but we never know quite what we're going to get.

And just like I'm sure many of us would wonder whether or not that next gift we open as a child was going to be the shiniest, brightest, best new toy, or socks from grandma, that's how we treat it in our adult lives.

And I think that one of the cool things about holidays is that they tend to amplify your experience.

If you're feeling disappointed and lonely and left out, then that holiday music in the grocery store is going to make you feel that all the more.

At the same time, if your life happens to be full of love and hope at the moment, you sort of want to bask in it and enjoy it.

Whatever your feelings are about the upcoming holidays, whether you want to get this year over with, or just, you know, enjoy the people around you, I think that you're going to find something in the stories that the tellers tonight are going to share, because they are going to come at this theme from all different perspectives, with so much varied life experience and, above all, a supreme talent for storytelling.

♪ PETERSON: My name's Lani Peterson, I'm in the Boston area.

I'm actually trained as a psychologist, and I've been working with stories for over 20 years in an applied storytelling way.

So, in addition to storytelling, I actually do a lot of story listening and story empowerment.

So, I work with people from CEOs in organizations, looking at at storytelling as a leadership skill.

I also work with people whose voices are marginalized, so I'm in the homeless shelters, I work with formerly incarcerated as well as in prisons.

HAZARD: Well, that is an extremely important mission.

What do you feel is the common thread in story-telling that allows it to be effective and important and valuable for so many different groups?

PETERSON: As human beings, we are... our brains are wired for stories.

I'm sure you've heard that, they talk about that a lot now.

But what that means is that we are making meaning of the experiences that we have, and through that, defining ourselves, creating ourselves, our identity is formed through the stories that we have lived and that we hold within, how we talk about ourselves.

So, essentially, in any moment, we are defining how we hold and know ourselves and how we want others to see us.

I think we all have a need to be known and to be seen, to be valued in that, and that that is part of our basic humanness, whether you are feeling like you're at the top of the world or at the bottom of the world.

When I was a kid, my mother did holidays up big.

And if you had asked me when I was little what my favorite holiday was, I probably would've said Christmas.

But as I got older, I really began to appreciate Thanksgiving.

Our family would come from all over, not only the state, but New England.

Cousins, uncles that we hadn't seen all year long would gather.

We would have to put every leaf in the dining room table, and then every cardboard table around, multiple tablecloths to fit 25 chairs around the table.

And then about 3:00 in the afternoon, the ancient great-uncles would come in the door, barely walking in with their canes.

My grandfather had emigrated to this country from Sweden with his five brothers.

All Petersons at immigration changed their names to Pete Peterson, so I had five Uncle Petes and a Grandpa Pete, all there around the table with their scraggly beards.

And as the wine got poured and the stories just filled the room, I thought, "Thanksgiving."

Now, my mom would start preparing for this massive group of people at least two, maybe three days beforehand.

And in that she had four small children, she would put us to work, because we desperately wanted to "help."

She became an expert at creating craft projects to keep us busy while she made the five pies.

She was very creative, we would do customized place cards and placemats, we would make Pilgrim hats for all the ancient uncles to wear during dinner.

We had papier-mâché cornucopias, we had turkey salad, which was actually half of a pear with sliced carrots to make the turkey's tail, a piece of celery for the long neck, and a pecan on top, and you could almost hear them gobble when they were there on the table.

(laughter) Meanwhile, she was busy peeling all the squash and the potatoes, heaped with butter, and the little pearl onions and the peas and the cranberry bread and the pumpkin bread, and we were just busy making our crafts.

And then, of course, the turkey.

Now, she had thought that in order to have a very moist turkey, it needed to cook long and slow, so she would put it in the night before at 200 degrees, but it had to be basted every two hours, which meant she got up at midnight, 2:00, 4:00, and 6:00, before feeding 25 people, in order to baste this turkey.

Now, you would have thought that this would be the centerpiece of Thanksgiving, but I am here to tell you no.

The most important part of Thanksgiving, you probably know-- it's the stuffing.

Now, the stuffing needs to be made very carefully.

it's not just breadcrumbs and turkey's juice.

There's the sausage.

But then, the secret ingredients-- apples, nuts, apricots, and the most secret ingredient of all, bourbon.

(laughter) Just the right amount of bourbon.

Now, people love my mother's stuffing so much that to make just that amount that fit inside the turkey would never have done it.

So she, somewhere early in her marriage, went out and bought a really big, beautiful clay stuffing bowl.

It only came out once a year-- at Thanksgiving-- and as she pulled it out of the basement, it almost had that smell of Thanksgiving, just to get us salivating before things happened.

I loved this bowl so much, that when she went around and asked each of the kids, as she was older, what we wanted from the family, all I wanted was the stuffing bowl.

But what I didn't realize is that if you got the stuffing bowl, you also got Thanksgiving.

(laughter) So there I was, several years later, with four little children of my own, and I realized how brilliant my mother was to have crafts, because all that help makes a very long day.

We did the placemats, the place cards, and then I got the brilliant idea-- tie-dyed t-shirts!

I bought each of my four kids five white t-shirts, 1,000 rubber bands, so they each had 250 that they had to wrap around five t-shirts.

In addition, I got 12 boxes of Rit dye, Royal Purple #12, and when all those shirts were done at the end of the day, we filled the sink with boiling water and as many boxes as we could put in, and let them soak.

However, all those shirts didn't fit in the sink, and I thought, "How are we going to get all these shirts done?"

And then I remembered the big clay stuffing bowl.

In the shirts went, in the boiling water, and another six boxes of Rit dye, Royal Purple #12, to sit for hours.

Oh...

I didn't know.

(laughter) When all was said and done and put away, I stayed up late that night and made the stuffing and put it in the fridge, and in the morning, I had four children with purple hands, in their purple shirts, and purple stuffing.

Have you ever seen a purple apricot?

It is not pretty.

But I had to serve it, because if you don't have stuffing, it's not Thanksgiving.

But then, of course, I'm afraid I'm going to kill them.

So, have you ever noticed on Thanksgiving Day, at the top of the newspaper, there's a poison control hotline?

(laughter) Did you ever wonder what that's for?

I always did.

But thank God it's there.

I called poison control.

And when they stopped laughing at me, they had to do some research, because they let me know they had never been asked this question before.

They let me know, "You won't kill anybody, it might not taste great."

I can handle that, I've got bourbon.

"But go ahead and serve it."

So, what we realized was that in order to pass this off, what we needed, in fact, was a really good story.

So we sat down, and we thought about it, and, of course, it all made sense.

Traditional Thanksgiving: Pilgrims, Native Americans, grapes.

Lots and lots of grapes added to the stuffing to give it that purple tint and hue.

This was the most traditional Thanksgiving, in fact, we've ever had.

(laughter) And so, as the great-uncles and aunts and cousins came in the door that Thanksgiving, there were my four beautiful children with their purple hands, in their purple tie-dye t-shirts, with one for every guest.

And as we served our purple stuffing, we were sure nobody had a clue.

Except that next year, when my great-aunt said, "Are you going to serve that purple stuffing again?"

And then I thought, "Well, you never know.

"Come and find out, because at the holidays, there's always a surprise."

(cheers and applause) ♪ WYMAN: My name is Phil Wyman.

For the last 32 years, I've been pastoring churches, until just recently where I stepped down, and now I'm traveling, mostly full-time.

But now I'm doing a lot of work in festivals.

Yeah, no, I think a lot of people have an image in their head of what a pastor is, and I don't think it usually involves having so much artistic commitment and diversity.

How did those worlds come together?

As a writer and a poet, and musician, songwriter, those things were just a natural part of who I was.

And so it seemed that it was impossible not to merge them together.

Do you feel that storytelling can be or is a tool for people from different backgrounds with different beliefs to sort of find common ground?

Yeah, yeah.

One of the things I do in my travels is I set up "Cigar, Whiskey, and Philosophy" events.

(laughs) Which are absolutely amazing, because we gather people of really wildly different positions, get them together to tell their stories, to speak to one another.

And what happens is-- sitting down, learning how to smoke a cigar and sipping a whiskey and telling stories-- people who typically wouldn't sit down together at a table end up hugging and walking away.

So stories are immensely important in learning about other people and learning to identify with them and to emotionally embrace them.

When I know somebody's story, I'm now attached to them in some way.

Well, it was 1986.

I had recently become a pastor of a small church in Carlsbad, California, one of those surfer towns where everybody wants to live.

But I was visiting New England for the first time, and I just had to go to Salem, Massachusetts.

Why Salem?

Because witches.

That's right, because witches.

I study other religions, specifically what's called NRMs: new religious movements.

And witchcraft is one of those new religious movements; it's a sub-classification of what is called neo-paganism.

And neo-paganism is one of the fastest-growing religious affiliations in Europe and in the Americas.

So I had to go to Salem, because Salem has thousands of witches.

And something happened when I went to Salem.

It cast a spell on me.

I fell in love with it, and it took 13 years, but in 1999, I moved to Salem to start a church.

Packed my surfboards and brought some friends, we started a church in Salem.

Now, I also wanted to do a couple other things in Salem, because Salem not only has witches, it also does something really well, better than any other place-- Halloween.

It does it not for a day but for an entire month.

Haunted Happenings goes for an entire month, there's 500,000 people who come and visit our city.

So I thought I'd like to get involved, but that's not the typical thing that you'd expect from an evangelical pastor wandering into town.

In fact, as far as the witches, well, in the '80s, there was a witch scare.

Witches were accused of being Satanists, of sacrificing babies-- none of that was true.

And in Salem, they wanted to get rid of the symbol of the witch that's on the side of the police car, they didn't want the high school to have the mascot of the witch.

And I thought, "There's got to be a better way to do these kind of things."

I wanted to befriend the witches, learn about them, tell the truth about them.

To me, that was an act of social justice, you know, it fits with, "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God."

Well, and then there's Halloween.

Christians and Halloween don't go along very well together, either.

But I love Halloween.

In fact, I think it might be the most Christian holiday on our calendar.

Christmas, you get together in your little families and kind of sometimes in your isolated little units, and that's really good, but on Halloween, your kids can dress up scary, knock on the neighbor's door, do weird things, and they say, "Aren't they so cute?"

There's this dynamic of openness that happens in Halloween that doesn't happen any other time of the year.

And then, even as adults, put on a mask, put on a costume, and what happens?

All of a sudden, you become a little freer, more so than in that inhibited, workaday life with all its tensions.

So we did get involved in Halloween in a really big way.

For the last 18 years, we've been running a stage every weekend of the month with live music.

And we have people who form hug lines, we give away free hot cocoa, we've got dream interpreters, and then we have the monks.

Well, the monks wander around with signs saying "Free Blessings."

And people get excited-- "Oh, I'll take a blessing!"

They just love it, because this is wild, spirit carnival.

It was about ten years ago, and a friend called me while it was just a couple days before Halloween, on a weekend.

And I picked up the phone, "Hey, what's going on?"

He was a witch, he owns a witchcraft shop and runs a psychic fair.

And he was in a panic.

"Pastor Phil, I don't know what to do, the street preachers, they're out in front of our shop, and, and, and, and they're harassing our customers!"

Now, street preachers come to Salem every Halloween with placards and calling down hellfire and brimstone, and, you know, signs about sin and judgment.

And so I looked at the monks, who were taking a lunch break, and I said, "The psychic fair just called and they're asking for help."

Now James, one of the monks, he looked at the other guys and he says, "Dude, let's monk up!"

(laughter) So he throws on his monk robe, and they do, and they run down the street, they monked up.

They went down the street to the psychic fair, and there, they arrived at pandemonium.

The preachers were preachin' and the witches were screamin'.

And, they're, you know, "Witchcraft is an abomination before God!"

"What right do you have to say this?"

And then one guy was trying to cast a demon out of one of the witches.

"Come out, you foul spirit!"

"Get away from me, don't touch me!"

And so a crowd was gathering, and the placards were waving, and the monks looked at the witches and said, "Just back away, we'll take care of this."

And they stood between the witches and the street preachers.

And they started to talk to the street preachers about the need to be loving.

Of course, you know, the street preachers really listened to that, right?

No, they didn't at all.

Of course, you know, now the monks were heretics, and they were spawn of Satan or whatever, but it took about 45 minutes, and it all calmed down.

And when it calmed down, the street preachers disbanded and scattered, and the witches were profusely thanking the monks.

Well, it's ten years later.

And if you go to a witchcraft shop in Salem or the psychic fair, or you come to one of the dream interpretation booths, it's not unlikely that you will hear the story about the day the monks saved the witches from the street preachers.

(cheers and applause) ♪ VALENTINE: So I'm Diana Valentine.

I've been doing storytelling for over ten years here in the Boston area.

Most of the time, when I tell stories, I tell personal narratives, but I'm really good at ghost stories, real ghost stories.

You have so much experience as a performer.

What's the secret to a great story?

VALENTINE: The great secret is to make the story feel as 3D as possible, so that you can connect with the audience, because overall, that's what you want the story to do.

They may not remember who you are, but they definitely will remember the story.

So my way of making stories 3D is creating a whole world, and by creating a world means that you give people senses.

So, in my stories, I'll talk about smell or taste or feelings or temperature, or the time of day, those kinds of things.

And then the other pieces of myself that I put in that kind of bring this in is I try not to let stories become stale in my mouth.

Sometimes, you can tell a story so many times it runs a rut in your tongue, and you're just like (groans).

So I put it away, tuck it into my heart, and I kind of think about for a couple months, maybe even a year, and then I try to bring it back.

It's 4:00 a.m. on New Year's, and I have just left my fifth New Year's Eve party.

We got to that moment where all the couples were like, "Love, it is time to go adjourn."

And all the single people were like, "Um, you'll do, right?"

(laughter) And I was like, "I'm all set, I'll just go."

My friends are like, "Do you need us to walk you home?"

I said, "I am four blocks from my house.

I can do this."

I was dressed like Adele, as I am now, because I had performed earlier that night.

And as I got onto the street and started walking, I developed a saunter.

One, two, three, stop.

Hold the fence, eat some snow.

(laughter) One, two, three, stop.

Hold the fence, eat some snow.

Take my boots off.

I had bought boots earlier that day, they were two sizes too big-- sorry, Mom-- and I put on three sets of ski socks, and even in the nice, freshly fallen snow on the sidewalk, my feet felt better outside of the boots.

One, two, three, stop.

Hold the fence.

What's that?

There are people walking down the street, but there aren't a lot.

Lots of couples in love.

Oh, that's nice.

I'm an independent woman, and my private eye internal person, my imagination, has picked up on an intruder.

There is a man-shaped shadow on the other side, pacing me.

One, two, three, stop.

I can't tell if he eats snow.

(laughter) One, two, three, stop.

So I turn, because I remember, in my CSI training from TV, that if you make yourself a person, you're less likely to be attacked.

Also, helpfully, my brain reminded me that I had read, just a month ago, that a woman had been attacked in the early morning on this very street.

Thank you, brain!

(laughter) But I am an independent single woman, and I can do this.

So I wave at the shadow, and the shadow, very Peter Pan-like, waves back at me.

Huh, hmm.

And I say, "Hello."

I would have said the rest, because I looked like Adele, but that song hadn't come out yet.

(laughter) And he said, "Happy New Year, m'lady."

Oh, m'lady.

"Happy New Year, m'lord," I can also Renaissance.

(laughter) And we start going back and forth, telling each other about the parties we had gone to, and he's from New York, and I'm from New York.

And he doesn't live here, and I live here, and we go back and forth.

And finally he says, "M'lady, would you mind if I joined you "on your side of the road?

"So I may say a proper adieu, "as my path has started to change, "and I need to go that way, and you look as if you're going this way."

And, of course, that internal lady was like, "We're actually going that way, but don't tell him.

As he walks across the street, I thought he looked like Louis from "Interview with the Vampire"-- you know, long, stringy hair, maybe.

Sexy.

Possibly.

But instead, he looked just like Brad Pitt, but "Meet Joe Black" Brad Pitt.

Long wool coat, short-cropped hair, and even in the shadows of the street light, I could see he had blue-green eyes, and also, he smelled real good.

He smelled like faint cologne and winter.

And he said, "Every year, I kiss a lady for good luck."

And I said, "Do you?"

And he said, "You will be special.

"If you give me the gift of luck, "I know you are the one to give me this, because you are the last lady I will kiss this evening."

I'm going to use that later.

(laughter) "Uh, sure, I'll kiss you."

So he gives me a kiss, and it is a nice kiss.

He, like, holds my face like in the movies, and he gives me a nice kiss, and it's very warm and lovely.

Well, that was nice.

He says, "Now it is your turn, I must give you the luck for you."

And I said, "Sure, if it was anything like the one a moment ago," and he said, "Might I help you back into your boots?"

And I was like, "What a gentleman."

So he helps me back into my boots, and he says, "Let me bestow the luck."

And so he gives me this kiss, and it is like a hot tub on the foot of a mountain in the middle of winter with champagne.

It is so nice.

And as I'm having this kiss, I hear a couple that were arguing up the street, and they were... the woman was shouting, "Oh my God, do you see how in love they are?

Why don't you kiss me like that?"

And I was thinking, "I don't even know this man's name, this isn't about true love."

And so we part, and I think he says goodbye, but I got distracted, because an ambulance comes screaming down the street, and the couple's angry argument boils over the sidewalk and kind of leaves us, and he's gone.

And I am pretty nearsighted, and I forewent the glasses, so he might've just walked 15 feet away.

So, just in case, "Goodbye, thank you for the luck!"

And I go home, and the next morning I look up my app, my singles dating app, and I see that he's within a mile radius, that's nice.

And I go to touch on it to contact him, but I'm a year older now.

I'm not the girl who runs off and says, "This is the story I'm going to tell my grandkids."

I'm a woman.

I'm an independent single woman.

And for me, that moment is enough.

That kiss with a stranger, under street light, on my favorite street for New Year, for good luck.

(cheers and applause) ANNOUNCER: This program is made possible in part by contributions from viewers like you.

Thank you.

♪