If you follow me on X, you know the scene at our house right now: everyone’s down with something—fevers, coughs, sneezes, the full symphony of misery. Everyone except Brandon. That man’s immune system is made of steel.
Last night we rang in the New Year the only way that felt right—piled on the couches under blankets, watching the final episode of Stranger Things, surrounded by sniffles and that thick, unmistakable cloud of Vicks VapoRub. Menthol sharp enough to cut through the fog of sickness and worry alike.
It felt strangely perfect. Because Vicks, like so many quiet comforts in my life, was born right here in North Carolina. In Greensboro, in the 1890s, a local pharmacist named Lunsford Richardson mixed up a salve for his own young son’s terrifying case of croup—those barking coughs that steal breath from little ones in the dead of night. He named it after his brother-in-law, Dr. Joshua Vick, and first sold it as Vick’s Magic Croup Salve across the pharmacy counter, one family at a time.
By 1912, it had become Vicks VapoRub, with its now-classic trio: camphor, menthol, eucalyptus. Simple, strong, and steady. When the Spanish flu roared through in 1918, killing millions and leaving medicine cabinets bare, VapoRub’s sales more than tripled in a single year.
It didn’t cure the flu—no one had that power—but it eased the coughs, opened the airways, and gave scared families something to hold onto. Comfort, when healing wasn’t possible, still mattered.
We’ve always been careful with it in my house. Because Papaw demanded it. In 1935, he lost his baby sister, Blanche, before she turned three. He carried the quiet belief that Vicks on such a tiny young’un might have done more harm than good—and modern warnings about camphor in little ones under two echo what he felt in his bones. He never forbade it. He just taught us reverence: use it wisely, sparingly, on feet or clavicles, never carelessly and never ever on babies.
Southern wisdom, passed down the same way everything important is—quietly, with love, and a healthy respect for what can help… and what can hurt.
So there we sat, wrapped in blankets and that familiar menthol haze, ringing in another year amid the sniffles. A small North Carolina original doing what it’s done for over a century: showing up when people feel worst, offering a little ease, and carrying far more history—and heart—than most folks ever stop to notice.
Wishing you all health in the New Year. And if you’re under the weather like we are… a little Vicks, applied with care, goes a long way.
