The Holiday Stroll is my favorite event in town. Basically, the town where I live, which is at this point a suburb of the expanded New York City metropolitan area, pretends to be an independent village, so that the old money, Ivy League denizens can feel good about themselves living in a small town. This is a town with more millionaires per square mile than homeless. This is a town which, in the six years of my attendance, had exactly two African American students in a school of 4000. This is a town in which it is a routine occurrence for friends to invite each other to Paris for the weekend. After all, what good is a private jet if it just sits on the tarmac? This is a town where the beginning of the top tax bracket is considered poor.
Of course, not everyone who lives in town is wealthy. But regardless of the statistical breakdown, it is very much a wealthy town. Moreover, it is old money. Tom and Daisy Buchanan would fit right in here. The mansion they had in the most recent movie adaptation wouldn’t even be the most impressive of ostentatious house I’ve seen in town.
The town also isn’t without its problems. On the contrary, it has a noticeably higher rate of drug abuse than surrounding towns, despite a lower official crime and arrest rate. Alcohol abuse, especially among teens, is well known to be endemic, but never acknowledged aloud. The public high school continues to pay out millions in lawsuit settlements for discrimination against students, and rates of suicide are alarmingly high.
But these problems are well hidden. The streets are safe and well kept (at least the ones downtown are). Home prices and property values are kept high by refusing to allow rehabilitation clinics or public transport to sully our streets. Schools have exceedingly low dropout rates, and standardized test scores are consistently above average.
The town is really quite good at burying its problems and making everything seem peachy. With just over three hundred years of practice, the town is adept at playing the part of a sleepy New England village. In summer, rows of flags and bunting line the streets. In the fall, vivid foliage distracts the mind and spirit from myriad woes. In winter, the businesses on Main Street string up lights and garlands in order to create the setting of a Christmas special, or else replicate a model train village. So convincing is the transformation that the town is occasionally used as a setting for Christmas movies.
The highlight of all this decorating is the Holiday Stroll. Businesses stay open late, charitable groups host bake sales up and down the street, organizations give out free popcorn and cocoa. Ice carvers create vignettes around the shops with Holiday motifs. Choral groups roam the street singing carols, and people dress up in holiday garb, whether that be woolen sweaters and Santa hats, top hat and coattails, or over the top getups wrapped in tinsel garlands and battery powered lights. Policemen direct traffic to accommodate horse drawn carriages, while Santa takes wishes from children at town hall.
It’s a show that the whole town is in on. It’s beautiful and magical in a way that seems to be, momentarily, perfect. And you forget that this is a town where multiple people have been indicted by the FBI for financial crimes, where husbands commit suicide because they can’t provide the level of luxury expected by the local culture, and where the public schools have made civil rights lawsuit settlements the largest recurring expense in the budget, because they have come to the conclusion that paying off those who don’t fit the mould to attend private school somewhere else is preferable to reforming the system. It leaves me with a kind of Canto Bite feeling- I wish I could put my fist through this whole lousy, beautiful town.
I don’t know whether other towns without all of the baggage and what I am inclined to see as moral corruption have something similar to the Holiday Stroll. I hope so, because it means there’s hope for keeping what I like about my town while excising the bad parts. But I don’t know whether that’s possible. I know part of what gives the Holiday Stroll its peculiar magic is the sense of authenticity. Hallmark holiday specials choose our town as the location where handsome and rich protagonists must overcome upperclass upbringing to see the true meaning of Christmas and family for a reason. People wear fancy sweaters and top hats to drink fancy liquor served chilled through ice sculptures at the jewelry store’s open house because that’s what this town is.
