My father's family farm was near the Johnston County line and had been in the family since 1700-something.

By the time I came along, what had once been more than 1,000 acres had been divided, inherited, sold and repurchased so many times that 100 acres were left to be part of my first home.

I remember going to an outhouse in those days. It always struck me as odd that my grandfather rebuilt an outhouse at his home years after he had indoor plumbing.

The new outhouse was functional, I guess, but as far as I know, it was never used. It was built for nostalgia, I suppose, which made it even more odd.

I, for example, wouldn't build a chitlin hole at my house.

At hog killing time, the pig's intestines were scraped clean and the contents were dumped into the chitlin hole.

As a toddler, I was dashing about when I fell face first into that same hole. I don't remember it, but I've been told it was a most unpleasant experience.

On my mother's side of the family, I often have heard about my grandfather leading a yoke of oxen from Granville County to help establish his farm in the shadow of Bethlehem Church near Knightdale.

Those two farms -- near Bethlehem Church and near what is now known as 40-42, which is the intersection of Interstate 40 and N.C. 42 -- form an unlikely juxtaposition with Broughton High's Holliday Gymnasium at the center of my Christmas memories.

When I was little, we'd join my father's family on Christmas Eve and my mother's family on Christmas Day.

It was a magical time for a youngster, and we usually returned home with a trunk full of presents, many for me.

Late one night on the Christmas Eve drive home, my brother, sitting by the window, swore he saw Santa Claus and his sleigh pass in front of the moon.

I looked too late and have regretted it ever since.

The next morning, any doubts I might have harbored about my brother's veracity were erased when I found two very distinct boot prints in the fireplace ashes.

That may have been the year I got a Cape Canaveral set AND a Roy Rogers Double R-Bar ranch set AND some books. What a Christmas!

My grandparents passed away years ago, but those memories are precious.

I thought of that holiday heritage when the GlaxoSmithKline Holiday Invitational announced it was moving from N.C. State's Reynolds Coliseum back to Broughton's Holliday Gymnasium.

What we used to call the Holiday Festival started 36 years ago. The idea was to create a high school event similar to the defunct Dixie Classic, which once was the greatest regular-season college basketball tournament in the country.

Eventually, the tournament committee -- people from Glaxo, The News & Observer and Wake County schools -- set the goal of making the Holiday Festival the best high school basketball tournament in the country. It succeeded.

In some years, the unofficial national championship was decided by games in the tournament.

Once there were six nationally ranked teams in the eight-team field. Another year, about a dozen ACC recruits were playing in the event.

But times change. I doubt my children have ever eaten chitterlings, much less cleaned them or dived into the chitlin hole.

This year's Holiday Invitational, which begins Thursday at Holliday Gym, is similar to the 1986 tournament, which marked a turning point for the event.

That year, Hyattsville DeMatha won the tournament and lifted what had been a local tournament into the national spotlight.

DeMatha is back this year and is one of two national teams in the field.

The tournament still has an abundance of players who may end up playing at Atlantic Coast Conference schools, but the majority of the teams are from the area.

Some, including Bob Gibbons, a national recruiting analyst, like the return to the tournament's roots. Gibbons believes Holliday Gym is the perfect place for a high school tournament. He'd like to see a few more national names in the field, but he loves watching games at Holliday.

At its roots, the tournament -- like me -- always has been a homebody.

Unlike me, it has never stunk.

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