Well, Black Friday is over. We didn't fare too badly, the Christmas music wasn't too intrusive and not one note of certain Christmas songs were heard.
The lovely Miss Carol and I capped off our Black Friday by running up to McKinney for their Dickens of a Christmas celebration. It was nice, but not entirely Dickensian. The live band with their drum sets and electric guitars sort of gave it away. For that matter, so did the booths around the old-old Courthouse selling fried you name it.
On the other hand, maybe the old boy would be entranced by the fact that one can buy a heart attack on a stick.
Yes, there were people dressed like characters out of "A Christmas Carol", but that was about it as far as I was able to see. To be fair, though, we arrived after dark. Perhaps there were more than just the handful of people dressed in the appropriate manner. One shopkeeper dressed at least semi-appropriately had a nametag declaring himself to be "Scrooge". A woman in the same establishment was labeled "Marley".
Downtown McKinney is a melange of antique shops, specialty shops, restraunts, art galleries and lawyer's offices. Until little over a year ago they had an honest-to-God pharmacy which at one point compounded their own medicines. We enjoyed cruising through a few of the shops (or, if you prefer, shoppes), some old friends, a couple of them quite new, indeed. The new Salza shop was particularly interesting. We found a great variety of salzas, jams, jellies and other things to spice up one'e life. I was particularly interested in the pies in a jar. Someone had the bright idea to package all of the ingredients of a pie into a jar. All one needed to do was to fill a pie crust with the contents of the jar and presto! Almost instant pie.
Pie in a jar still doesn't have the panache of the home-made pecan pie made by the lovely Miss Carol using pecans from our own back yard.
We avoided the specialty popcorn and candy store. Too many calories the day after Thanksgiving for one thing, and the statue holding the sign for that particular store seemed a little bit too realistic in the bust. In other words, it wasn't Dickensian enough.
We tarried here and there against an 8pm closing time, entering one of our favorite antique shops just as the proprietress was announcing (without the benefit of a public address system) that her shop would be closing in 20 minutes. We did a quick twirl of the premesis soaking up 15 of those 20 minutes, then left to head back home.
All in all it was a nice evening. A "date" if you will to a familiar place pretending to be a piece of Merry Olde England roughly 150 years ago... complete with electric lights, electric guitars and a parking problem about 2 blocks over. Will I go again? Certainly. Someone in McKinney has done something right. Downtown McKinney is vibrant and alive like downtown anywhere should be. And this is despite at least 2 Walley Worlds, a Sam's Club, Lowe's, Home Depot and every other big box option you've ever laid eyes on within a 10-15 minute drive. Certainly the ideal of free enterprise is alive and living and here's the proof.
Neither of us went to the Dickens-themed event with any "Great Expectations" that we would be recipients of visits from spirits of Christmas past, present and future, but we were quite pleased with the fare offered, indeed.
Just a little bit more, please?
Be Seeing You!
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