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.

In 1966, Broadway songwriter Stephen Sondheim was offered the opportunity to write a one-hour musical for television to be broadcast on the ABC Stage 67 series. He turned to his collaborator, James Goldman, with whom he was developing a musical that would emerge later as Follies, and they adapted a James Collier short story about a poet who abandons the world to live in a New York department store. There, to his surprise, he encounters a society of people who have done the same thing over the years, among them a young woman who went to sleep in the store as a child. They fall in love, but are threatened by the store's other denizens, who fear their secret will get out. Anthony Perkins played the poet and Charmian Carr (who had been Liesl von Trapp in the previous year's film version of The Sound of Music) was the young woman. Sondheim wrote four songs and much underscoring. The songs "I'm Here" (aka "If You Can Find Me, I'm Here"), "I Remember," "When?," and "Take Me to the World" earned recordings on Sondheim albums later, but the soundtrack to the program was not released legitimately. That inspired theater buffs, who dubbed it from the videotape and pressed it up on a bootleg LP, also trading it as a tape between them. The tape runs about 45 minutes (the commercials having been deleted), and it gives a good sense of the show, with Perkins and Carr coming off well as the doomed lovers. It is not a major Sondheim work, by any means, and the songs can be found elsewhere, but for the Sondheim cult it is a treasured (and hard-to-find) rarity. ~ William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide

Mr. Brenner makes a down payment on a house. The house's owners, Cissie and Johanna Enright say that they don't want to sell. He threatens them with a lawsuit, but is poisoned. He collapses and the sisters discuss what they should do. Joanna wants to finish him off more poison while Cissie prefers a gun. Brenner revives and pitches on sister against the other. He gets the gun from Cissie and shoots Johanna. Cissie gives Brenner more poison whilst he phones the police, telling them that Johanna poisoned him and that he shot her. Finally, the poison kills him and the house is all hers.

Two sisters from Indiana, the wide-eyed and innocent Mae Thorpe, and her more streetwise sister June, move into the Rolf House for Homeless Girls in New York. With June's help, Mae obtains a job as a stenographer for the scientist Joseph von Schraeder, while June gets work as a telegraph operator at Western Union.