This Year’s Bright Gift Idea:
Shop Bay Weekly Advertisers

The Thanksgiving turkey is now soup, but that means we have still more blessings to count. Like that turkey, Bay Weekly makes many appearances, and I don’t mind likening my life’s work to so providential a bird.

With the 49th issue of 2008, Bay Weekly has come round 782 times.

For that periodical privilege, we have our advertisers to thank. For paying for our pages is their confidence in returns on the dollars they invest in Bay Weekly. One, Bob Platt of Pirates Cove, has supported every one of those 782 issues.

To say thank you with words that matter, we’re dedicating our annual Guide to Gifted Giving to gifts you’ll find by shopping our advertisers.

We buy our advertisers’ products and services all the time. But never have we shopped as comprehensively as we have for this issue. For it, writers Margaret Tearman and Diana Beechener joined editor Sandra Olivetti Martin in visiting every store and learning about every business that supports us with a continuing contract for eight or more ads.

We’ve had our own holiday of fun choosing gifts from businesses you might not think of spontaneously as places to do your holiday shopping. Jewelry stores — and we have five of them as regular advertisers — were easy: None of us had any trouble imagining the baubles we’d want tied to our Christmas tree, so we won’t overlook the small packages containing valuable gifts.

If you like gifts with long-term value, gold’s certainly a better gift this year than stock certificates.

It also didn’t take much invention to recommend gift certificates for eating out and nights on the town. After all, these are pleasures we all want but increasingly do without when money’s scarce.

Some advertisers were a bit more challenging. But our creative team found good reasons for giving wills, preplanned funerals, addiction treatment and emergency veterinary services.

We’ve put it all together in a story that we think will give you fun, too, in the reading — as well as good advice.

For we’ve also been reminded how our advertisers build our communities. We’ve always said that Bay Weekly delivers Chesapeake Country into your hands in miniature each week. In our pages, in advertisements as well as stories, you read about “the people in our neighborhood,” as Mr. Rodgers said. Their enterprise and perseverance anchor us in place. Their businesses give us things we need and places to go. Increasingly, they also make our communities beautiful by investing in the face they present to the world.

In turn, we like visiting their businesses, talking with staff and owners and discovering how each has turned what they like and do best into opportunity — for us and for them.

We hope you’ll discover all this for yourself. You will if you give your thanks for the paper you’re reading for free by doing your holiday shopping with Bay Weekly advertisers.

Editor and publisher Sandra Olivetti Martin

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