Let the Holidays Begin!

Fall is just leafing into winter, but we’ve already caught the holiday spirit.

We hope to infect you, too. The pathway of contagion is this week’s once-a-year holiday special — Local Bounty: Your Indispensable Guide to Holidays on the Bay — which likely fell out of this week’s paper into your lap.

The telltale signs of holiday fever? We’re trotting like turkeys and humming Christmas carols — all but calendar editor Diana Beechener, who’s perfected her bah-humbug delivery over the last eight weeks while compiling this award-winning holiday guide. To make the point, a two-faced Scrooge stands on her desk. Now that this year’s Local Bounty is out of her hands and into yours, she will turn the figurine from Bah-Humbug! to the face wishing Merry Christmas!

Open the guide, and you’ll find we’ve expanded our boundaries of holiday celebrations, as Diana’s stretched her reach to Baltimore, Washington and the Eastern Shore to bring you tidings of great cheer both far and near.

Holiday happenings are organized by four categories, starting with Illuminations. There, you’ll find 14 places brilliantly lit to help us all turn the tide of darkness and bring back the light. We expect their magic will work, in your heart and in the universe, as Winter Solstice on December 21 begins the six-month reversal back to long days of light.

Next comes Holiday Shops & Shows 2008, to guide you to continuing shows, exhibits and open houses. These are places decked out for the holidays, where you can celebrate the season and, often, bring home its bounty to decorate your home and to spread cheer among family and friends.

The kids’ favorite section comes next. In Santa Sightings, you’ll reaffirm the old saint’s magic. How else could he take time to visit so many places in the very season when his work is most pressing? We newspaper people understand how deadlines work, so we’ve no doubt Santa will finish everything on time. Take the kids to enjoy him while he’s here. He’s already making visits to Marley Station Mall and Westfield Shopping Town. He makes a couple of other early visits, too. But his calendar really starts to fill the Saturday after Thanksgiving.

Best of all is Day by Day, a calendar full of events for the six weeks of the winter holiday season. From November 20 to January 4, you needn’t go a day without celebrating the holidays. Diana’s even found a 12th Night Ball on January 10 to add a final flourish to 2008’s Holidays on the Bay.

Keep your Local Bounty, and maybe pick up an extra for any friend who might miss this week’s issue of Bay Weekly. That’s the only way you can be sure you won’t miss a spot of cheer this year — because you’ll only find Your Indispensable Guide to Holidays on the Bay in Bay Weekly. You won’t find it on line. Copies go fast but last long.

Let the holidays begin!

Sandra Olivetti Martin, Editor and publisher

Comments