Hunkering down with chin in hands, I try to hide in the back of the auditorium. The reason for my concealment is the unusual costume my parents had me wear to church on Christmas Eve. I am a young child and dressed in weird looking overalls being made to pose for photos as a book end with my twin brother. I sit, half-smiling while in reality wondering why am I wearing this and where did it come from? and wishing to be back home listening to my dad read The Night Before Christmas and dosing off into an anxious night of sleep. Later I would come to learn that my ‘costume’ was actually a traditional Bavarian lederhosen—a gift my parents brought back with them from Munich when they returned home from a trip to Europe. This was my first realization that the world extended beyond North Little Rock, Arkansas, and even further that the people of this world were intertwined.