I'll never forget the night I discovered "the town that saved Christmas."

I had signed up for a bus trip out of Tioga County, Pennsylvania, to Kentucky. I had never been to either place before, nor had I ever taken a trip on a tour bus. As we left the rolling hills of the Allegheny Plateau, I realized everyone on the bus was local -- from a region called the Pennsylvania Wilds (aka PA Wilds). I perceived this was the case when someone spoke up and said, "Always strange leaving the hills, isn't it?" Passengers gazed lovingly out their windows at the passing hills and quipped "sure is" and "so true," followed by a collective sigh.

After we returned from our trip, I decided to explore the area whose inhabitants felt such a strong connection to their land. That's how I first stumbled into a town called Wellsboro, Pennyslvania.

As I walked on, I was astonished to find that the main street had a wide grass median complete with authentic, working, gas street lamps. An impeccably preserved 19th-century downtown created the effect of a postcard from a bygone era. I wondered what kind of wayback machine I had stepped out of.

I approached the clerk at the counter, who looked -- unintentionally or maybe on purpose -- like a kindly older gentleman from another century.

"Excuse me," I said, "I was wondering if there is some sort of story behind that flag over there."

He looked over his glasses with a smile on his face and said, "Oh, don't you know anything about Wellsboro, Pennsylvania, the Shiny Brites, and the town that saved Christmas?"

Although it was summer, I felt as though I was a character in a classic Christmas story, standing in the midst of swirling snow as the images of Christmas long, long ago began to take shape.

For the glassblowers to fulfill their orders, every member of the family was required to work -- sometimes 15 hours per day for two or three weeks straight. For this and other reasons, they began to circumvent the trading houses by inviting registered dealers to their home factories. These dealers represented larger retailers: Enter American entrepreneur F.W. Woolworth.

The year 1880 was a lucky one for the gifted glassblowers of Lauscha. That was when the man who pioneered merchandising and direct purchasing visited Lauscha to see what all the fuss was about. Impressed with what he saw, F.W. Woolworth placed a small order for glass ornaments to be sold at his store in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The new Christmas novelties, selling individually at flat prices, sold out quickly.

By September 1939, however, Adolph Hitler's invasion of Poland and a British blockade ended the United States' import of German ornaments. A German immigrant and ornament importer based in New York City, Max Eckardt, saw a crisis coming. Most U.S. Christmas ornaments came from Germany, and, with no glass ornaments and much less electric lighting than we have today, the upcoming Christmas looked dark and gloomy.

Corning began experimenting with the creation of glass "blanks" created with the same machines that made light bulbs. Molds cupping hot glass traveled along a conveyor belt, a puff of air created its hollow shape, and a silver coat on the inside made it shine. The experiment was a success, but now they had to put their Wellsboro plant to the test to see whether they could retrofit their glass bulb operations in time for Christmas.

Shiny Brite bulbs continued to be the most popular Christmas tree ornaments throughout the 1940s and 1950s, and many of us still have them today -- carefully passed down to us by loved ones with happy memories of Christmases past.

The hotel clerk had told me a story for the ages, a story of when America made her own goods and people worked together for a country they were proud of.