It’s Time to Turn the Corner
Our delivery drivers report that readers on their route set their weekly clocks by Bay Weekly’s arrival, so I apologize for knocking your Thursday routine off track. I blame it on Thanksgiving. Our non-competition agreement with the holiday requires that once a-year, Bay Weekly comes to you on Wednesday.
So when you’ll be reading this week’s paper is a mystery. Wednesday, in the midst of baking pies? Thursday, with so many comings and goings to assemble the right gathering for our national feast? Friday, when merchants hope and pray our whole goal is shopping? Saturday and Sunday, when the great holiday illumination begins in early-bird homes across America? Cyber Monday, when online merchants compete for our dollars?
On the other hand, you could keep a simple holiday, with plenty of time for reading and loafing, that great ideal that so many of us aspire but so few attain.
Certainly some of us will have lonely Thanksgivings.
Whether November 21’s Bay Weekly is a diversion, a companion or one more item on a too-busy holiday agenda, I hope you’ll fit it into your long holiday weekend. We’ve deliberately made it a small paper, so it won’t take up too much of your time. But the time you give it will be worthwhile.
On the advertising side, this is the week our partners are offering just what you’ve been wanting. On the editorial side, 8 Days a Week is just as opportune as ever, full of events you won’t want to resist no matter how full your schedule. On the editorial side, we’ve gathered stories that take you to the heart of the holiday.
In Creature Feature, nature photographer (and, in his other life, Bay Community Health medical director) Wayne Bierbaum shows us the full splendor of a Native American tom turkey and tells us about the habits of the bird that’s the icon of Thanksgiving.
In Giving Thanks, we invite you to join us in appreciating our Chesapeake Country neighbors — people and organizations — dedicated to improving our world. The five groups we’ve chosen are not just picking up the trash — to use a metaphor one of those groups, the Alice Ferguson Foundation takes literally. They are, as the Foundation does in its Trash Free Potomac Watershed Initiative, working to stop the trash at its sources.
With equal energy, each of the other four organizations is solving problems and improving our world on its own front.
STAIR, recruiting tutors to help kids in Anne Arundel County learn to read at the critical juncture for acquiring that life-skill: second grade.
The American Chestnut Land Trust, preserving Calvert County’s pristine land.
Also in Calvert County, the New Linda Kelly Animal Shelter, helping animals into healthy shape to find homes.
Finally, we’re posthumously honoring Bruce Michalec, and the Anne Arundel County Food Bank he created, for feeding the hungry.
Each of these organizations has room for you to join them in solving the problems of our world. So this week’s Bay Weekly invites you to do more than give due thanks. We invite you to invest your thanks in the future.
May you have many reasons for giving thanks, and a full plate as well as a full heart as we turn the corner from the season of thanks to the season of giving.