Honk Country -- Revisiting It's Almost Here

Christmas is almost here.

Elsewhere I'd posted:

Even while it was Halloween season, Dollar General filled an aisle with Thanksgiving decorations and supplies, but it had already begun filling aisle after aisle with Christmas supplies, everything from candies to table decorations, gift wrap, indoor and outdoor decorations, tree decorations and many other items like Santa Claus mugs -- you name it. I'm talking thousands of items. Last Friday I was in Dollar General again for the first time in nearly three weeks. Hardly anything is left. The shelves are stripped. I don't mean by the staff to make room or go for returns or whatever. By shoppers. People have bought all this holiday stuff. Let us recall too, that not only is our county the least densely populated county in all of Maryland, it is the poorest county in all of Maryland.

A friend remarked vto the effect that so many people must be lazy or uncreative.  Why didn't they decorate paper towels with crayons or make stuff for Christmas instead of buying all this junk?

Another friend returned:

"If you're struggling to put food on the table, Christmas dinner may be nothing special or fancy. Spending a dollar on a package of colorful paper napkins to make it a "holiday meal" is not something for which I want to criticize anyone.

And our local Dollar Generals and Dollar Stores take food stamps in payment for items which qualify."

To which I say, that's great! I agree 100%, for what that's worth. Thank goodness there is a general store where people who only have a dollar or so to spend on things that are necessary or for fun can go. More and more people need this price break -- such chains as Dollar General are among the few businesses who gained customers since the crash. There was a feature on them in the NY Times back this summer, which included the information that more manufacturers, faced with the facts that jobs aren't coming back, and the middle-class is disappearing, are putting out items that are geared for Dollar General stores' type of operation, in terms of volume, size, to hit their price break. IOW, we the people, all the people, of the United States of America, need this low-priced outlet.

One of the big problems about living in Manhattan is these places don't exist. The last versions of them in my neighborhood got chased out in 2004. I've bought things at Dollar General that have been fun because they cost a dollar, whereas in NYC I don't buy them because they cost so much more -- and they are the exact same item. Even things like tissue and cleaning supplies are less than a quarter the price they are in NYC.

We were at one of the two local supermarkets right outside of town last night. None of the people shopping at 8 PM looked happy (people here get up around 4 or 5 and are in bed early -- you don't see little kids out and about at all hours here like at home). They were not zooming through the aisles happily pulling from the shelves, filling their baskets to the brim. No matter how much they were buying, each thing they took was chosen after careful consideration of price and so on, whether a young mother by herself, an elderly man by himself, a late middle-aged couple.

I kept thinking how lucky we were -- we weren't trying to make a Merry Christmas for a whole family out of terribly pinched circumstances, or having the holiday solitary.

Christmas here is just like it was where I grew up. It is the center of the year.

Last weekend 'town' was filled with people who had come in to shop for Christmas gifts, for their wives, their husbands -- people they are close to, not obligatory gifts. People bake gifts like crazy too. They make things by the ton -- what is called the latest arts and crafts movements, or 'craftiness' (because this is women mostly, I guess, otherwise these are hobbies or avocations or something), for home use, and for gifts in their social and church circles. Every night the churches, schools, municipalities sponsor choirs, plays, dances, parties, dinners -- social get-togethers of all kinds. People hunt and they eat what they kill, and share it around. Your larger family beyond spouse and children live here too. Thinking of the young women at the supermarket last night, who were obviously shopping for at least children -- well she probably doesn't have much energy left after driving many miles back and forth to some shit job -- maybe she's a cashier at Wal-mart? -- to keep her family's body and soul together -- she's probably hasn't got much left over to be creative with, particularly if two of her four kids is sick. Because those events all month are community events, their children, they themselves, have been participating too, with refreshments after, with little gifts for teacher and kids' friends and the choir director and so on so forth. Somehow, some way, they are making Christmas for their family, and have been doing so all month long.

This is all a lead-up to the really big night and day. By Friday at 3 PM, everything here will have shut down -- the stores, the libraries, all the gas stations except Dutch Royal out of town that services the big rigs, the coffee shops, the bakeries, the restaurants. You want to eat out Christmas Eve or Christmas Day? You drive to Baltimore, baby.

This is how it was where I grew up at Christmas. This is how it is again, this Christmas of 2010. My home and the windows are decorated with ornaments, ribbons and lights I got at Dollar General. The table will have a Christmas cloth, mats and napkins too, all from Dollar General.

Maybe that was the point of of the previous entry, but I didn't make it clear, or maybe even make it: the Dollar Store's Christmas supply aisles were stripped ten days before Christmas because here, in the way it used to be called, "the true meaning of Christmas," Christmas matters to everyone. No wonder I feel so at home here.

On the other hand, I also can never forget the primary reason this county is the least densely populated and the poorest, why there's no corporate development here, is because it is almost entirely owned by the DuPonts, as part of their vast regional feudal land ownership that goes back to the end of the 17th, start of the 18th centuries. This is their summer vacation and fishing, fall and winter hunting preserves ....