04/13/2026
Not Real Estate related, but because this is a song I love and one that evokes emotion in so many, I wanted to share it. If you are under the age of 40ish, there is a good chance you are unaware of this song. If that is the case, I encourage you to have a listen.
It was Christmas Eve, 1975.
His parents wanted to make Irish coffees. They sent him out for whipping cream.
Her mother wanted eggnog. She sent her out for that.
It was late. Nearly everything in Peoria, Illinois was already closed for the holiday. The only store still open was a small convenience store at the top of Abington Hill — a corner that, on any other night, neither of them would have thought twice about.
Dan Fogelberg and Jill Anderson had graduated from Woodruff High School together in 1969. They had dated on and off through high school — the kind of teenage romance built from shared hallways and poetry passed between classes and a nickname he invented by twisting a Crosby, Stills and Nash song title into something that belonged only to her. He called her Sweet Jilleen Green Eyes.
After graduation they scattered — the way young people do when the whole world suddenly opens up. Dan went west to chase music in Colorado. Jill went to college, then married, then moved to Chicago and built a life as a flight attendant for TWA. Six years passed. Neither had spoken to the other.
Then they were both standing in the same convenience store on the coldest night of December.
Jill didn't recognize him at first. When she did — when the face from six years ago resolved itself into the man standing in front of her — she went to hug him and spilled her entire purse across the floor.
They laughed until they cried.
Standing under the fluorescent lights of that tiny store on Christmas Eve, they were suddenly nineteen again. All the years between that moment and the last time they'd seen each other collapsed into nothing. They were back in the hallways of Woodruff High before life had intervened with its opinions about where people were supposed to go.
They wanted to find somewhere to sit and talk properly. They tried every bar they could think of.
Everything was closed.
So they did the only thing available to them. They bought a six-pack of beer, climbed into her car, and sat in the parking lot for two hours in the freezing Peoria cold — catching up on six years of living with the engine off and their breath fogging the windows.
They talked about her marriage. His music. The distance between who they'd been and who they'd become. They toasted old memories. They tried to make sense of the strange, tender, slightly heartbreaking fact of running into each other exactly here, exactly now, on Christmas Eve of all nights.
When the beer was gone and the words finally ran out, she kissed him as he got out of the car.
He stood in the snow and watched her taillights disappear.
That was all. No promises. No plans to meet again. Just two people who had once meant everything to each other, sharing a quiet accidental hour before returning to the separate lives they'd chosen.
Five years later, Dan Fogelberg sat down and wrote every detail of that night into a song.
He changed two things. He made her eyes blue instead of green because it fit the melody better. He made her husband an architect instead of a physical education teacher because — well, it sounded better in a song. Everything else was exactly as it had happened. The convenience store. The spilled purse. The six-pack. The cold car. The kiss. The falling snow.
He called it "Same Old Lang Syne."
It was released in 1980. It reached number nine on the Billboard Hot 100 and became a holiday staple almost immediately — not because it was a Christmas song exactly, but because it captured something no Christmas song had ever managed to capture before. Not the joy of the season. The ache underneath it. The way going home for the holidays means running the risk of running into who you used to be.
Jill heard it for the first time driving to work before dawn, alone in her car, the radio on.
That sounds like Dan, she thought.
Then she listened more carefully to the words. A convenience store. An old love. A six-pack in the cold. The realization came over her slowly and then all at once — her story, their two hours in a parking lot on Christmas Eve, was playing on radios across America.
She never told a soul.
For nearly three decades, she carried it quietly — hearing the song every December, knowing it was hers, saying nothing. Dan kept her identity private too. His wife later said he believed in what she called "a gentleman's silence."
They did see each other again — backstage at one of his concerts years later. He apologized for changing her eye color. She laughed. They stayed friends. His mother exchanged Christmas cards with Jill every year until she couldn't anymore.
Dan Fogelberg was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He died on December 16, 2007. He was fifty-six years old.
Six days later — six days, just before Christmas — Jill gave her first interview to the Peoria Journal Star. She confirmed everything. The store was real. The six-pack was real. The snow was real.
There was one lyric, she told the reporter, that she wouldn't discuss.
"She would have liked to say she loved the man, but she didn't like to lie."
She wouldn't talk about it. But by the time the song was released, she had already divorced her first husband.
"I'll always have a place in my heart for Dan," she said. "Dan would be a very special person to me, even without the song."
In 2008, the city of Peoria gave the street outside that convenience store an honorary name: Fogelberg Parkway.
The store is still there. You could drive to it on Christmas Eve, park in that lot, and sit for a moment with the ghost of two people who had no idea — sitting in a freezing car with a six-pack of beer going warm in their hands — that they were making something the whole world would one day feel.
Dan Fogelberg wrote songs the way some people write letters. Not to be famous. Not to be admired. To be understood.
And somewhere in that parking lot on Christmas Eve in 1975, in the silence after the last beer and before she drove away, he found the kind of truth that doesn't need a melody to break your heart.
He gave it one anyway.
