A friend of mine in Roanoke told me that she had purchased all but one of her holiday gifts – and that was well before Thanksgiving. My wife, daughter and mother-in-law also start their shopping early, sometime in July, but the buying always continues until near Christmas eve.

But there was a time, long, long ago, when gift-giving meant a few simple toys for the children and the exchange of inexpensive trinkets, handmade articles and homecooked goodies for the adults. The Valley folks still hang onto many of the traditions that make the yuletide season special, but many others have disappeared into the mists of time.

One tradition that continues in name only apparently is unique to the 347-square-mile area encompassed by Page County in the central Valley. It’s called a "bran pie." When I was first introduced to the custom just before I married a Page County girl some 32 years ago, I thought it was something to eat. My soon-to-be wife said to me one day in late November: "Would you like to go over to our farm for the bran pie?" Already she had introduced me to such country delicacies as fried merkels – the local name for morelle mushrooms – and creasy greens. So I said, "Sure, why not?" hoping to disguise my ignorance.

When the big "bran pie" day arrived, I found out that it didn’t involve eating a healthful dessert at all. No, indeed. A "bran pie" is what they call the drawing of names for gifts among a family or other group of people, such as employees of a company, a club or a community organization.

Having been born and raised in New Market, a mere eight miles or so from the Page County line, I was stunned that I had never heard of such a tradition. But I didn’t question it at the time. After the holiday flurry had passed, I asked some of my older relatives in Shenandoah County if they knew what a "bran pie" was. Not a single one of them had ever heard of it. I asked my friends and co-workers in Rockingham County. "A bran what?" they invariably asked.

Finally, I wrote to the leading expert on Shenandoah Valley folklore, a Madison College professor named Dr. E. L. Smith. His reply was somewhat dismissive. He had never heard of such a thing either. From his tone, I got the impression that he didn’t believe my theory that this particular term for drawing names was peculiar to only one small rural county of all the rural counties in the U.S.

I continued my informal research among the members of my wife’s family and various residents of Page County. All of them were familiar with the expression and were surprised that I was not, especially since I was about to marry into one of the county’s founding families. However, none of them could give me a clue about why the practice was called a "bran pie." One day, months after the holidays, I asked my future father-in-law, Charles L. Burner, who was born in 1897, about the origin of the phrase.

"Oh," he said. "I don’t know for sure, but when I was a very small boy, we used to each get a little gift for our parents, brothers and sisters, and sometimes aunts, uncles and cousins. We would sneak out to the barn and push the wrapped presents down into a barrel filled with bran. Each present had a long string attached and a tag with the name of the person it was to be given to.

"By the time Christmas rolled around, there would be many tags sticking out. When the family all got together for the holiday meal, we would go out to the barn in a big bunch and each person would pull the presents with his name tags from the bran barrel, which some people called a ‘pie.’ Then we’d have a grand old time guessing who had given us the presents."

So there was the full explanation of a local name for this custom, which is common all over the U.S. but is called a "bran pie" only in Page County, Virginia, as far as I have been able to determine.

Although I have asked many other older residents of the county about "bran pies" over the years since, not a single one of them had ever heard of the origin of the term. My kind and hard-working father-in-law, a lifelong Page County farmer, was the only one I could find who knew about the origin of the "bran pie." He died Dec. 23, 1977 as he worked in a field of the farm that has been in his family for more than 250 years. But some of his memories of the times when Christmas was celebrated in a much simpler and more spiritual form remain with me today.