Sally Chamberlin

Elizabeth Winfield is a retired teacher, who desperately tries to keep her family together. While she's traveling through the country and meeting her relatives, back in her hometown, a group of shopping mall developers are planning to take over her family land in order to begin their ambitious project. Now she needs to find ways to stop this construction in time before the town's annual festivities.

A city-bred grandson moves to his grandparents' farm during the Great Depression and grows up enough under their tough care to help his grandfather deliver a surprise gift on Christmas Eve to their community church with the help of a phantom stranger.

It's Christmas Eve, early 1930s on Walton's Mountain. As the family prepares for the holiday, they anxiously await Pa's return home from his job in the city some 50 miles away. He is late, and Ma and the grandparents hear on the radio a report of a bus accident that worries them. Oldest son John-Boy must step up to help grandfather cut down a Christmas tree, and upon learning the concern about Daddy sets out to find him.

Hamilton Cade is an alcoholic teacher striving to put his life back together. He accepts a job tutoring an "exceptional child" only to find that young Freddie is mentally retarded. A black man who works for Freddie's father also becomes interested in teaching the child and becomes a second role model for him.

To eliminate internal opposition, a cruel CEO sabotages and humiliates a good-natured executive in an effort to force his resignation — and make the reticent new hire his new yes man.