Priscilla Herdman sings lead on this song, which was recorded in concert at Happy Days Visitor Center in the Cuyahoga National Park in 1999. Anne and Cindy join in on the harmonies. The trio has combined their efforts several times over the past few years, and produced together the CDs "Voices," "Voices of Winter," and others.

In concert, Priscilla often tells this story of why this song means so much to her.

"A few years ago, I took my daughter Susanna, to see the house I grew up in. It was a place that I have always remembered in my heart and in my mind as looking the same forever. It was a white, 1880s Victorian house with shingles and a wrap-around porch (before my father changed it into a bigger living room--it was pretty crowded in our house).

I pulled up in front and I couldn't believe what I saw. The entire yard, front, back and sides, was paved! It was a parking lot. I looked up and realized that the big picture window my dad had put in the front of the house was now a dentist's office. The entire house was no longer white. It was covered with pink brick and pink stucco with a black fire escape up the side. After my daughter stopped hugging me because I had big tears running down my cheeks, she asked me what was wrong. I said that it wasn't the same. It wasn't the house I had grown up in anymore. I felt like the whole thing had been pulled out of another time and wrapped in this stucco and brick like a shroud. It didn't give me the same feeling I remembered. It changed some of the memory in my heart. I don't want to go back and look at it anymore.

The reason I love Beth's song is because her house is the same as it probably is in all of our hearts, the same house that we each grew up in, the same house we remember, especially at Christmas time."

But what was going through the author's mind? Here's what Beth Nielsen Chapman told us about the song.

"The song Years is one that I wrote when I was living in Mobile. I had gotten married and moved there in 1979 into a house that belonged to my husband's family. His grandfather had built it. I had never had the experience of living in a community where everybody's roots were so deep. I would stroll my child around the block and I would meet people who knew my child's great-grandfather, and that just blew my mind. I wrote the song 'Years' from the standpoint of if I had grown up in one place, when, in fact, I grew up on Air Force bases and we moved around every couple of years. That experience had it's own merits, things that I missed and things that I gained from moving around. Writing the song 'Years' was my way of working through that issue. I had been a really transient child all through my life, and here was this opportunity to feel what it would be like to be born and raised in one place. It's the story of a kid coming home from college and the first lines explain the streets that are turned down to get home. I've imagined myself in that position and the reason that the emotion of the song rings true was because I really was able to connect to the emotion of what that was like, because I was now living in this house that had so much history in it."

Learn more about Herdman-Hills-Mangsen at annehills.com/trio.