When his mother gives him a garden plot for his tenth birthday, Jackson Jones hopes to earn enough money to buy a basketball, but all he seems to get is trouble.
Sarah is too embarrassed to speak Spanish in front of her friends at the Columbus Day party until Anna's cousin from Colombia explains her own secret fear.
The widow McDowell and her seven-year-old son Thomas ask the gruff Jonathan Toomey, the best wood-carver in the valley, to carve the figures for a Christmas creche.
Happy to spend his summer vacation at home in the city, eight-year-old Jay is horrified by his parent's plan to spend two weeks in the Vermont woods sharing a house with another family.