WILLIAMSTOWN -- A mile or two east of Grafton, N.Y., on Route 2 is an old barn. It's on the left as you head toward Massachusetts, set back perhaps 50 yards off the road, down in a shallow ravine. It overlooks a meadow.

I'd passed it countless times going east and west, but it first drew my full attention on a cold, clear night in 1979 as I drove from Troy, N.Y., for a Christmastime gathering with my family in Williamstown. It was a Friday.

My plan was to spend the weekend with the folks. I'd had a long year, beginning in January with an assignment to cover a notorious murder case for the former Times-Record (later The Troy Record). Other tough assignments followed, so by the time Christmas rolled around, I'd witnessed and chronicled what I then considered to be a lifetime's share of grief, brutality, guilt and suffering. I was feeling blue around the edges.

The defendant in the murder case, which was tried in Albany County Court, was Lemuel Smith, later referred to by some pundits as the "poster boy for capital punishment." In the trial I covered, Smith was accused and convicted of the murder of the owner of a religious goods store in downtown Albany and his secretary. Before his final sentencing and incarceration in 1981, he had been found guilty of three other murders, including that of Donna Payant, a guard in a state prison where he was serving time. As a young man, before returning to his native New York state, he had faced charges of kidnapping and rape in Maryland, where he'd been imprisoned and later paroled. He had been a suspect in at least two other deaths. Now 83, he is serving three life sentences in a maximum-security prison.

My only face-to-face encounter with Smith was in a crowded courtroom 45 years ago, and my memory of it has not faded. I was sitting at the press table with two other reporters. Situated to provide the best view of the proceedings, the table abutted the aisle along which defendants must walk in order to reach the lawyers' tables.

Promptly at 9:30 a.m., a door at the back of the courtroom opened and Smith, whose wrists and ankles were chained and shackled, was conducted toward the bench by three sheriff's deputies. Their progress was briefly halted when one of the deputies walked ahead to open a gate in the bar railing. Lemuel Smith stood directly in front of me. It occurred to me later that he might have thought me rude for staring at him, but I'd hoped to be able to describe him for my readers. (No cameras were allowed, and the paper didn't employ a sketch artist.) Smith returned my stare; our eyes locked for only a few seconds, but it was long enough to chill me to the core. The gold-flecked irises of his eyes glowed briefly in the sun shining through the east-facing windows behind the press table.

After the foursome moved on, my counterpart at the (Albany) Times Union lightly tapped my wrist. Shirley Armstrong, a veteran court reporter known throughout the region for never missing a trick, had noticed the encounter. "My God, that man would kill you," she said. I replied that I'd had more pleasant beginnings to my workdays, and we laughed it off.

Experience has since taught me that the effects of stress are cumulative and have a way of sneaking up on people. I've also learned that stress relievers take a seemingly infinite number of forms. On that December night, headed for home on Route 2, I discovered one that worked for me for years afterward: The barn was decorated with a large wreath decked with white lights. It illuminated the meadow just as biblical storytellers and an ambitious poet, Clement Clarke Moore, seem to have imagined. In the Bible, the light was soft and holy. In the famous poem claimed by Moore as his own, "A Visit From St. Nicholas," it was the light "of the moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow," giving "the luster of mid-day to objects below."

(Deservedly, Troy lays claim to being the site of the poem's first publication on Dec. 23, 1823, by an anonymous writer in the Sentinel, a distant newspaper ancestor of the Times-Record, which continued the tradition for many years, publishing it on its front page each Christmas Eve. In 1844, Moore included it in an anthology of his work. The validity of his claim of authorship has been disputed in recent years.)

The barn's owner reprised the wreath display every Christmas, and I habitually slowed down for a better view. That, followed by Christmas movies on TV and liverwurst sandwiches, were among the key features of my annual holiday gift to myself: Call it spiritual rejuvenation.

A mid-19th century Shaker hymn, "Simple Gifts," describes it best: "'Tis a gift to be simple, 'tis a gift to be free; 'Tis a gift to come down where we all ought to be; And when we find ourselves in the place just right, 'Twill be in the valley of love and delight."