In my hometown of Mt. Vernon, MO, we have a festival every fall, the second weekend in October to be exact. If I remember correctly, the festival began as a way to celebrate the ripening of the apple crop, and one of the traditional ways of preserving them…Apple Butter. When the festival began it was a small local festival, there was contests and competitions, all aimed at entertaining the community. When I was a child, all the children of the town would gather at the town square to compete in the various competitions and cheer our friends on as the competed. The smell of fresh apple butter cooking over and open fire dominated your senses, folks dressed in period clothing passing out samples of fresh, hot apple butter. Everyone in town and the county attended the small town event. Families would schedule vacations around the festival to be able to return to their hometown to enjoy the festivities and visit with family and friends. This was the Apple Butter Making Days of my youth. At some point in the last twenty years, the town council decided that our little town festival was a gold mine, the amount of money crafters were will to pay for a space in the festival is astounding. They began eliminating the competitions, weeding them down to the ones that took the least amount of effort or made them money. The amount of booth space has quadrupled in the fifteen years, making our small town festival into a major craft fair. This year as I contemplate taking my two-year-old daughter to Apple Butter Making Days, I remember the Apple Butter Making Days of long ago. The days before making apple butter on the square to sell was forbidden by the state health department, they even took away our samples. The days when our small town festival, was a small town festival with a sense of community and sharing in the traditions that so many of us grew up with, now it’s just a money making venture propagated by the town of Mt. Vernon, that is desperately seeking to make itself into the Vienna of the Midwest.
Fellow ABMD'er!!! I live in Mt. Vernon, too...so I know EXACTLY what you're talking about!!
ReplyDeleteMy 'joy' of ABMDs is that I live virtually in the MIDDLE OF IT!! From 5pm (which seems to me to be creeping increasingly closer to 4pm) on the Thursday before the Friday OF until around 6 or 7pm the following Sunday...I'm an apple butter prisoner in my own home!!
As people converge on our sleepy little town (by the TENS of thousands), MANY of them manage to find their destructive way into my yard! In the last few years, I've lost THREE rose bushes to the "butterers"; even this year catching a mere lad HACKING one of the bushes with a sword of some sort! No parent or older sibling IN SIGHT!
To be honest...I've missed the more 'traditional' aspects of ABMDs gone bye, too...&
I'm not originally FROM here. But I have fond memories of turtles racing their fat little legs off to the thunderous cheers & giggles of my boys.
Now the city is telling home/business owners, especially those of us with property down close to the square, that we'll be FINED if we set anything up on our property without PAYING the city for it! They "own" our property during ABMDs?
Wow. Apple Butter Communism.