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January 2007
It's a Wonderful Life
By: Larry Duffy
Creative Director
Like many during the holiday season we did a little entertaining last month. It’s always nice to get the family together before Christmas Day to celebrate the season in a more relaxed fashion. December 25th is of course the big day, but for most people it passes quickly in a chaotic blur of church, travel and gift-giving. The gathering provided an opportunity to show off our house decorated in the holiday style. Everyone ate and drank and admired the tree. The kids ran and played and snatched candies from dishes. The television was showing “It’s a Wonderful Life” for anyone who cared to view it for the fiftieth time. While the women remained sentimental about the movie, the consensus among the men is that Donna Reed was a total babe and missing Savings and Loan money or not, George Bailey had nothing to gripe about. The movie’s setting in the fictional town of Bedford Falls drew some obvious comparisons to New Town.
I took them as the compliments they were intended to be. There is indeed a charm and quaintness to our New Town that is reminiscent of a simpler time and place. Unfortunately there is an inclination in our cynical society to dismiss this way of life as old fashioned or corny. Well if quality of life and intelligent neighborhood design are corny than I’m Jimmy Stewart. Most everybody who has taken the opportunity to live in New Town has embraced the old fashioned ideas of activity and community involvement. Sure we have a few Mr. Potters in town who are never satisfied with anything, but as New Town continues to grow they continue to become increasingly irrelevant.
New Town is not a Hollywood set, but a real town with real people. It has become a fascinating place to live where an extremely diverse group of residents write the script to their own wonderful lives. At the party, my brother-in-law commented that New Town would be the perfect setting for Christmas Carolers and asked if we had seen any. I told him we didn’t have any make it to our house yet. Then as if they had been cued, not an hour later there was a group of ten ringing our door bell. The entire family stood on the porch and were serenaded by inspired voices singing songs of faith and hope. After three tunes they proceeded down the street where a neighbor was waiting for them with a tray of fresh baked cookies. We all stood outside for a while, basking in the glow of colored lights, marveling at the Norman Rockwell moment we had just enjoyed. The whole experience seems contrived and improbable until you stop and think about it. If you were assembling a group of Christmas Carolers and you had the choice of wandering some endless sprawling neighborhood with no side walks or strolling the welcoming, walk able streets of New Town, which would you choose? This community of ours lends itself to these sorts of events. In a town where we are use to seeing people out and about on the sidewalks and in public spaces, Christmas carolers seem like a natural extension of all that activity.
Unlike the meandering isolation zones that are most subdivisions, New town has become a place to expect the unexpected. In the last year without leaving my neighborhood, I’ve seen tightrope walkers and fire jugglers; banjo pickers and cellists, sailboats and teepee’s, antique bicycles and Black Hawk helicopters, Great Blue Heron and the St. Louis Hawks along with the most spectacular fireworks display this side of anywhere. Why would I be surprised to see Christmas carolers?
December turned out to be the exclamation point on a spectacular year in New Town. In one month’s time we enjoyed a years worth of weather, with bitter cold ice and snow storms giving way to balmy sixty degree days. We’ve seen the spirit of New Town shining in a million Christmas lights up and down the streets of our community. We’ve enjoyed the lighting of our beautiful tree at the Town Hall while we assembled for hot chocolate and fellowship. We’ve enjoyed hosting our families and friends as we welcomed them to be a part of our community and revel in the Christmas cheer. So now the time comes to ring out the old and ring in the new as we sing Auld Lang Sine and raise a glass to a wonderful life. 2007 promises to bring many new faces and many new places to our New Town. There are many scripts to be written yet and everyone’s invited to come and lasso the moon.
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