EAST MONTPELIER, VT – Hermione was a character. When she could, she lived in tobacco-clouded splendor at the Hanover Inn, which suffered her presence until management finally realized that not only was her ship not just about to come in, but had left port many decades before. She was a world-class temporizer, and it was usually not until a member of the constabulary arrived with an eviction order that Hermione returned to the streets and her default condition, which was living in the back seat of a large old Buick sedan. From this base of operations she would plot her next campaign to secure lodging, food, and – in the winter – some means of warmth.

The Christmas season – or in the Christian Church, the Advent season – is devoted to preparing for the impending incarnation of God. We are adjured to be ready: to get straight before it’s too late; to focus upon what’s really important to not just us, but to the world and humanity in general; and specifically, to care for the widowed, orphaned, and marginalized among us. Many of us who take this seriously experience, I think, a strange mixture of enthusiasm, expectation, and distaste. The result is often a fuzzy benevolence that expresses itself in doing things we ought to be doing all year-round, anyway: sending gifts to the children of prisoners, “adopting” a needy child for the season; playing Secret Santa to those we perceive to be in need; singing carols with the residents of old people’s homes; and taking boxed hot turkey dinners to shut-ins.

But Mother and I – mostly Mother, if the truth be told – have often felt the urge to travel the extra mile, as it were, and perform more particular and better-focused deeds of Christmas charity. This has led occasionally to unforeseen and somewhat perplexing results, and, during our declining years, to a need to pick our targets more carefully and shoot a bit more accurately.

About 45 years ago, somewhat bored with our lives during the cold, snowless days of late fall, we succumbed to the temptation to say yes to the offer of a pair of young Mormon missionary elders to guide us through the Book of Mormon and explain the joys of lives as Saints. We read our way through the odd 19th-century scripture with ever-increasing skepticism; but we really liked personally the kids who were working so earnestly, so far from home, to reap the harvest of souls. So Mother invited them to Christmas dinner, which in those days we held around a sheet of plywood perched on sawhorses in the living room.

They arrived – one of them still groggy from the emergency extraction of an abscessed tooth earlier that day – and we had as great a meal and as jolly a time as anybody could have with guests who seemed constantly to be checking for evidence of Episcopalian decadence and wine-bibbing. Then Mother brought in dessert, a magnificent warm plum pudding with hard sauce. We all had hefty slices; and then suddenly we had only one guest. The dental patient had slid silently beneath the sheet of plywood and lay unconscious on the floor. “My God!” gasped Mother sotto voce. “The pudding! It has a cup of rum in it!” We revived the theretofore teetotaling elder and gently plied him with ice water and cold compresses on his forehead. We never saw them again.

Hermione, however, was the guest from Hell. Mother and I and the kids had moved from the Adirondacks to Hanover, and were finding it difficult to locate someone upon whom to shower our (albeit meager) largesse. So we went to our priest and asked if there weren’t some poor soul with no means to celebrate the holidays. Well, yes, he answered, there was someone; but were we absolutely sure we wanted to do this? Yes, we were sure. He told us how to contact Hermione.

She was afraid, she said, to drive her car in cold weather. Could I pick her up at the corner of the Inn? I did. Halfway to our house, she slapped her pockets and discovered she was out of cigarettes. Could I run her to the store? And she’d misplaced her wallet. Could I lend her a couple of bucks for the cigs? Even as innocent and naive as I was then, I could detect a con job.

We got to the house. Dinner was imminent, but did I happen to have any whiskey to warm up a shivering old lady? She wasn’t shivering, but yes, I did, and she downed a couple.

Hospitality is a great virtue – even a cardinal one in some societies: Never turn the stranger or the needy from your door. Our kids gazed in barely concealed wonderment as Hermione, clad in elegant, elderly furs, smoked through dinner, talked incessantly, and referred to the august then-president of Dartmouth, John Sloan Dickey, as “Johnny Dickey.” She and he were, she assured us, dear friends. Small town that Hanover was then, I was sure he was at least aware of her existence. I vowed to keep a straight face next time I saw the priest, and he asked about our guest.

After dinner we sat in the living room, where she managed to burn two cigarette holes in the upholstered foam cushion of our big settle. She spotted our son’s checkerboard and asked if he’d like to play. He was about seven then, and just learning. That meant that when we played with him, we were always careful to ponder our moves as if stumped, and then made stupid mistakes that let him win. Not Hermione. She trounced him every time. We watched his little face get redder and redder with frustration. It was weeks before we could get him to play again.

Later, driving her back into town – just drop me under the porte-cochere at the Inn, she said – she hinted she’d love to see us again anytime. I mumbled something encouraging, and formed an opinion of the virtue of hospitality. It’s something we’re clearly called to exercise, but we need to understand that it’s a lot like jumping into water whose temperature we haven’t tested first.