Editorial

Chesapeake Thanksgiving

As transplants to Maryland, we’re too aware of our blessings to take a good thing for granted. We’ve loved flatlands homogenized by monoculture. So we can tell you for certain that Chesapeake Country is easy to love.

On and around the Bay, water weaves throughout our lives, farmland rolls into woods and the weather keeps us on our toes. As newcomers, we’ve learned our history from people who live it as well as from museums because we settled in a state that keeps a good part of its culture in the present tense. In Chesapeake Country, we even have indigenous species that are also delicious, and because of them we enjoy a distinctive cuisine.

We’re so close to the big city — indeed, the nation’s capital — that we can turn cosmopolitan in less than an hour. And we’re populated by more interesting citizens because for generations smart people have migrated, at least part-time, from the big cities to our waterfront and countryside.

Not that we need to go to Washington or Baltimore for the kind of culture that you spell with a capital C. Our capital, Annapolis, is part-time home to everybody in Chesapeake Country, and it shares its concentration of urbanity and specialization of history with our whole region.

All those are the blessings we who bring you Bay Weekly have to be thankful for. So much so that we’ve made our mission preserving those resources that give Chesapeake Country its distinction. Every week, you see those values played out in our stories and even in our advertising.

This week, for example, you’re opening the biggest Bay Weekly ever: 76 pages in two sections. In the 44 pages of our special section, Local Bounty: Bay Weekly’s Indispensable Guide to Holidays on the Bay, you’ll find some 225 ways to join in Chesapeake Country’s varied celebration of the five weeks between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. A few guide you to Washington or Baltimore and thereabouts for one-of-a-kind experiences. Most introduce you to your neighbors in Chesapeake Country, dressed up and displaying their finest skills in tribute to the season. Fall in with the fun, as we do, and you’ll not only have plenty of good times but also enrich your understanding of the diversity of our culture.

That’s icing on the cake of your weekly paper, where it is our routine pleasure to keep you in touch with the life of this place we live. This week, you’ll meet our Amish neighbors in St. Mary’s County; the big-hearted and good-time-loving citizens of North Beach; the Cultured aficionados who give us the Annapolis Opera; and the hurricane-resilient people behind Annapolis Maritime Museum.

You’ll anticipate Thanksgiving on the new farm, and crane up into the canopy of Smithsonian Environmental Research Center on the Rhode River south of Edgewater.

Last week, of course, we followed the hard path that Chesapeake’s native Piscataway people are walking to gain official recognition from the state. Next week, we’ll give you a special look behind scenes at the pageants of Christmas.

On top of all that, each issue — and especially through year’s end — you find local businesses to patronize and goods and services made and sold by local people. Here and now, in our shared present, these neighbors sustain Chesapeake Country. Shop, savor and spend locally, and you will keep us all rich — in wealth and spirit, through the holidays and beyond.

All this is what we mean by Local Bounty, and this is why in Bay Weekly thanks–giving comes every week.