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Dec.
2 . . . 3:36pm . . . leaving campus
Wild
Thing and I are just leaving campus. It’s an amazing day, with
the sun and the wispy clouds. I feel like being outside, and Wild Thing
says he feels like driving with the windows down. So we do, for a bit.
Neither of us can believe that it's December; it can’t be less
than 70 degrees out. We pass the Green Door and Cook’s. Wild Thing
says he wants an ice cream, but we decide to get it on the way back.
Dec. 2 . . . 3:49pm . . . intersection
of Rt. 5 and Great Mills Rd
We’re by the Sheetz that all the kids go to for their late night
snacks. French fries are tempting, but we turn right onto Great Mills.
We pass McKays and the parking lot is practically empty. We get to Rt.
235, and there’s a long line for gas at the Wawa. We had never
thought about it before, but at the same moment both of us realize that
Wawa looks a lot like Sheetz, both with their red color schemes.. of
course, when you get up close or just think about it for a minute, you
can tell the difference.
Dec. 2 . . . 4:01 . . . Wildewood Shopping Center
Wild Thing and I are bored with the landscape, so we decide to stop
in at Wildewood shopping center. We decide to go into JC Penny to look
for a gift for my mom’s birthday. The weather’s still great,
and Wild Thing says he’d almost rather be outside in the parking
lot than inside some stuffy store. So I leave him on the bench outside
the doors and go in on my own.
Dec 2 . . . 4:08 . . . in JC Penny
The first thing I see when I walk in is a huge Christmas display. I
wasn't expecting the Christmas cheer to start so soon. It didn’t
even feel like winter outside! Of course, I saw some commercials for
sales on the day after Thanksgiving, but I didn't think much about it.
Maybe I should look for some Christmas presents, too…
  
I walk around the store for about ten minutes without finding anything
I really like. Well, there are some cool Christmas-y shirts, but I glance
at the label and see they're made in Honduras. My cousin was adopted
from Honduras. I wonder if her brith mother made this shirt...
There
are tons of people in line as I walk out of the store. A woman is buying
that shirt from Honduras, and I want to tell her about my cousin, but
I don't.
Dec.
2 . . . 4:25pm . . . back on Rt. 235
There’s lots of chain stores here. I’ve always known it,
but when it gets close to the holiday it seems even more true. Sometimes
I notice that I only see the chains, that I read the signs I recognize
from year of passing by on highways and side streets and ignore the
signs I’ve never seen before, the business names I can’t
remember because they aren’t national. I mention this to Wild
Thing and he says he’s never thought about it before. We stop
at Target so I can buy some batteries for my digital camera.
Dec.
2 . . . 4:42pm . . . Target
Target’s even worse than JC Penny. The Christmas stuff is everywhere.
Wild Thing and I wander around like zombies, enchanted by the shiny
stuff, the red and white cutout snowflakes and wintery shapes. I read
an article in the New York Times on Thanksgiving weekend about the man
who designed the Holiday décor for Target. The article made it
sound like these cutouts were going to be so wonderful and enchanting,
but they just come across as cheap to me. It’s the products that
are really on display, of course.
Santa’s for sale in every aisle; on platters, as a toy, in colored
lights. It’s all so ubiquitous that it turns into a joke for Wild
Thing and me. Where will we find him next? In the jar of peanuts? Next
to the bike tires? Behind the cash register? Look, there he is on some
socks! How ridiculous!
I decide I want to be Santa, too, so I pick up one of the iconic hats.
On my way out I realize it was made in China. What does that even mean?
Dec.
2 . . . 5:27pm . . . Back in the car
It’s getting dark already and Wild Thing and I are sick of stores
selling us Christmas cheer. It’s all so fake and detached from
meaning. We talk about baking cookies for our friends instead of buying
presents. Wild Thing wants to bake brownies with peppermint sprinkles.
The drive back to campus is quiet as we each watch the glowing commercial
lights slowly fade into the distance behind us. We turn onto Mattapany,
and the road is almost as dark as I remembered it would be.
Dec. 4 . . . 11:47am . . . the Dining
Room
Wild
Thing and I are eating lunch and talking about Christmas. We’ve
both been thinking about the stores from a few days back almost incessantly.
It’s like a new obsession, how to deal with this problem that
has suddenly manifested itself to us. It must have been around for so
long. How did Christmas become commercialized anyway?
Dec.
6 . . . 2:05am . . . my bedroom
Neither Wild Thing nor I could sleep, so we started talking about Christmas
and commercialism again. The ways that it is manifest in our immediate
landscape are really horrifying, if you think about it. This place used
to be forests and fields. Even five or ten years ago, the green space
on Rt. 235 must have been double or triple what it is today. Now every
time we drive out there, we notice another construction project. Will
it ever go back to being the way it once was? We miss seeing those farms,
those fields, as we drive home and back again.
Wild Thing just had a thought. Maybe we can’t bring back the fields,
but we can back away from the commercial imposition into our landscape.
It’s really all those chain stores that are the abomination. I
don’t even see the local stores anymore, it’s just national
brand recognition after national brand recognition. And Wild Thing thinks
the solution is somewhere between the forests and the local businesses.
We can reconceive of the way we relate to the space around us by simply
seeing through the Chain stores, as though they don not even exist.
These are comforting thoughts for us.
Dec.
7 . . . 10:23am . . . the kitchen
We awoke this morning with a sense of purpose. We can catalog the stores
in our area, then make a point to patronize only the locally owned places.
Once we know how to get everything we need from local stores, we wont
even see the chains anymore. We can restore the places where those buildings
and signs sit to their former natural glory. We can take that space
into our imagination and picture whatever we want there. We don’t
have to see a Wal-Mart, we can see a farmhouse instead. There will be
more to Rt. 235 than we had originally thought.
Dec. 10 . . . 7:48pm . . . driving on Rt. 235
Wild Thing and I are coming home from a long day of research out here
on the commercial drag. We’ve cataloged all the businesses we
can. We want to make a comparison of the number of local store to the
number of chain stores, and then we want to map out the local stores,
to provide a resource for other people to take on this project of seeing
through the corporate signs and buildings.
We’ve found that there are tons of places we never knew about,
tons of specialty shops that we would have never gone into if we hadn’t
cut Target and Wal-Mart out of our lives. Everyone should visit Bait,
Tackle and Guns. It’s completely amazing and so representative
of St. Mary’s.
Dec. 12 . . . 4:27pm . . . in the Computer Lab
Wild Thing says this project has changed the way he thinks about shopping.
It’s fun to browse only in the places where you know you can find
something totally unique. The joy of the search through the aisles of
Target no longer invigorates him, it’s just a bore to see the
same stuff he could get anywhere in the country. He says he wants something
that’s really special, something someone made with their hands
and sold without a middleman. He wants to find those kinds of things,
and now, he say, he knows where he can look.
We just finished uploading the map and the
business list. Check them out, we’re
proud of them.
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