| Celebrate the Season with the Local Bounty of Chesapeake Country
Falling into your lap are countless reasons to spend your holidays - and your hard-earned money - in Chesapeake Country. It's Local Bounty, and for the next five or six weeks, you won't want to let it out of your sight. Here's why.
Just when chill weather makes Bay pleasures a little too frosty for many fair-weather friends, Chesapeake citizenry serves up a warmer banquet. As if elves were hard at work while we were sleeping, we turn the corner of Thanksgiving into one long winter holiday.
Autumn's gold and red are a carpet under our feet, but our halls are decked with evergreens. Darkness falls fast and early, but brilliant lights illuminate the long nights. The sounds of summer are silenced, but Christmas music rises from every corner. We've entered the 21st century, but the ghosts of Christmas past refresh our memories and rekindle our traditions. It's cold outside but warm inside, where friends gather. Santa's workshop filled with hand-made magic and marvels is no North Pole fantasy: Look around you. At least every other citizen of Chesapeake Country has been busy making the holidays happen.
Singers sing in full voice. Dancers dance in costume. Musicians fiddle and fife. Maestros and directors call forth magic in a conspiracy with actors. Artisans are sorcerers, adding imagination to turn mere matter into gold. Chefs roast and bake and garnish. Gardeners prove that winter has a blooming season all its own.
There's enough to do and see and buy to bring home to keep you in Chesapeake Country until 2001.
We've gathered up all that local bounty into a nice little book - the one that's fallen out of this week's paper and into your lap. It's your indispensable guide to keeping up with the season. Use it well, and you'll harvest all that's here, sustaining not only your holiday spirits but also our community and our planet.
Harvesting our local bounty of celebrations, goods and services is a way, for instance, to avoid the stress and frenzy displayed at the opening last week of the new Arundel Mills mega-mall, where people began lining up at 5:30am to wear the ridges off their credit cards. By 8am, autos were lined up for a mile along Rt. 100 to get inside, where an announcer on a stage was shouting, "Let's go shop."
Each to her or his own, but some might consider it a vulgar display of consumerism for so many to wait for so long for the opportunity to spend money they may or may not have on a bunch of gifts made by cheap labor (perhaps even prisoners) in China, Malaysia and Hong Kong.
Why export our wealth when, as we demonstrate in these pages, we can spend our precious money on locally made goods and services that our friends and family can really appreciate? Shopping locally also enriches our communities by keeping our wealth at home.
That's why, each year, we call it Local Bounty.
Copyright 2000
Bay Weekly
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