Just as every family has its traditions, the Newtown community has accumulated a sleighful of holiday customs over the years. The town is so eager to get started each year that Thanksgiving’s wishbones are barely broken before we start filling sacks with sand for the big luminaria display in the center of town. This is the first weekend in December, which means that it’s time to light the town tree in the Ram Pasture and dress up Main Street for the Annual Holiday Festival. It’s also time to remember that this season isn’t all about commerce.

The tree lighting, the festival, and a full slate of fairs, feeds, and festivities all around town, face some pretty formidable competition. Mall managers all up and down the interstate have tuned up their cash registers to run full-out this weekend, hoping the frenzy of national product advertising will drive everyone to their doors. But the more we think about the crush on the highway, the hunt for the elusive parking space, and the lines at the checkout, the better a weekend spent close to home looks to us.  This weekend of celebration in Newtown, with its attendant crafts and antiques shows, musical performances, and way stations of wassailing and refined refreshment, seems far closer to home, literally and figuratively, than anything they are offering out there off the interstate.

For six hours on Sunday, some of the gracious homeowners on Main Street are even opening their doors to the public, inviting one and all to cross the threshold into their private observance of the season as part of the popular Holiday Festival House Tour. Yes, there may be lines, but unlike the stonefaced stoics one encounters in the lines at the malls, the people waiting in the dooryards of Main Street and its surrounds will be your friends and neighbors – all with plenty to talk about in passing the time.

If you absolutely have to get some shopping done this weekend, you won’t have to wander far. Aside from the crafts and antiques, the merchants of Newtown have gone out of their way this year to give Christmas a hometown feel. As always, the people behind the registers are people we know. They serve us year-round. It’s always nice to let them know that we support them as well.

This year, celebrate the season close to home, where the holiday spirit is the strongest. Get things started right with candles and caroling on Friday night, when we all follow the paths of luminaria to the Ram Pasture to light the town tree. We’ll, see you there at 6:30. Don’t be late.