Historically, I’ve been something of a Grinch about Christmas. This is not to say that I actively try to deny people the holiday — no ornaments up my sleeves, no roast beast in my bag — but I have been known to, passive aggressively, make the holiday a miserable experience for those around me.

Example A) My mom: Let’s take a drive around the neighborhoods to look at the Christmas lights!
Me: But X-Files is about to come on.
Mom: *SIGH*

Example B)  Best friend: There’s carolers at the door!
Me: Tell them we don’t need any.
Best friend: *SIGH*

My reasons for not liking the holiday were legion. Shopping was an upstream battle in the crowds. Other shoppers were terrible. Traffic was terrible. The music was atrocious. The food was fattening. The drinks were fattening. The smells were fattening. The kids were annoying. Their parents were more annoying. Being thoughtful was really hard.

It does go deeper than this surface disdain, though. My real difficulties with the holiday have to do with all the expectations, specifically that expectation of happiness. The pressure to be happy tends to make me actually rather unhappy. For some of us the Christmas season is less an umbrella of general jollity, and more a magnifying glass of specific pain. Perceived faults and deficiencies of our own lives and the suffering of others are made hyper clear when the message being sold to you is one of loud, inescapable, suffocating blissfulness.

You should be happy. Why aren’t you?

Perversely, working retail during the Christmas season does make me happy. Discovering that my natural habitat is behind the counter of a bookstore was the best thing that happened to my Christmases since that purple Popple Santa brought in 1986. I get to be the helpful, bookish elf to hundreds of Christmas shoppers, some more harried than others. My unique skill set is such that I can pick out the perfect book for your Secret Santa and remember what picture book you got your nephew last year like some kind of bookish Rain Man. In short, I can make other people happy.

Yes, sometimes there are disgruntled customers, but when I keep in mind that perhaps they are just like me, and that being out in public in a retail location on December 21st is actually their ninth circle of hell, turned up to 11, then I can forgive them. Everybody has bad days; some of us have more of them in December.

This all goes to say that I thank every one of you as customers for helping make my holiday season enjoyable. I can only hope the bookstore has brightened yours a bit as well. Happy holidays. Be kind to your Grinches.

The post The Grinch Who Left Christmas Where She Found It appeared first on Main Street Books Mansfield.

I met Landree five years ago when I took over the store’s book club and started the writing group. She was one of my most faithful book-lovers and writers. For five years I had seen her without fail at least three times a month. We were never close friends, but we shared a love for the written word, which I have found is often all you need.

To be a wordsmith puts you in a secret society with the rest of us who believe in the underestimated but unflinching power of language. Though we shared this club membership, we did not read the same kinds of books or write the same kind of stories. We shared a respect for each other, and through that respect were able to learn from each other. We each read books we may not have picked up otherwise and learned to look at our writing from new angles.

Landree was a solid, talented writer and regular contributor to our writing group. She had pieces in the works that had great potential. It saddens me so much that they will not be finished. After engaging creatively with someone regularly for as long as we had, you begin to know them. Especially in the context of writing, which necessitates at one point or another, total vulnerability, the laying bare of your soul at the feet of people you hope are kind — in this situation we had a unique, trusting, intimate relationship.

I often joke that the bookstore collects characters — both as players in the books and as the wonderfully quirky clientele that make up my regulars. Landree was one of my characters, in her pink coat, pink purse, pink gloves and Star Wars-themed dresses. She was also one of the bookstore’s biggest supporters, coming to events often and never leaving without at least three new books under her arm.

I have lost four of my favorite characters this year, each loss harder than the one before. There are so many reading metaphors to make here: closing the book, turning the page. But life is not a book, it is not a story with carefully designed plot arc. In a novel, Landree would have still been setting the scene, pushing through the rising action, which makes this real life loss particularly tragic.

I had a professor who once told me there were two kinds of narratives: the Quest and the Then Nothing Was Ever the Same. Today we find ourselves in the latter. It will take a long time to realign our lives to this new reality, to pick up the plot line and keep writing our own stories. In the meantime, keep Landree’s family in your thoughts and hug your loved ones.

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When I was a girl, my mom and I would go to the local mall to shop for Christmas. Back then it was a full, bustling place, lights and baubles everywhere and Christmas carols echoing through the cavernous halls. After we finished buying for our lists we would walk to the middle of the mall, near Santa’s station, to the Giving Tree. This short, artificial tree bristled with cards hung by ribbons, each labeled with a child’s name. Inside the card were the child’s Christmas wishes, their sizes and color preferences, and their age.

My mom and I would go through each card, looking for the kid we were afraid would never be picked by anyone else. The oldest one, the one who still had baby fat, the one with geeky hobbies — essentially the one that most reminded us of me. We didn’t have a preference girl or boy, just a kid who was old enough to know where presents came from, or didn’t.

Then we would carefully shop, being sure to get some of the essentials on the list — new winter coat, new shoes — plus a generous supply of the fun stuff and then something they didn’t ask for, a little luxury. For girls we would buy a set of soaps and perfumes and for boys, a little gadget from Radio Shack. Often a book made its way in the pile, too.

Satisfied, we’d set the bag of unwrapped gifts, carefully folded with gift receipts, under the tree with the child’s card tied to the bundle. It was a glorious and strange feeling, to be doing something good anonymously for a stranger. I wanted Stuff as much as any other kid, but this feeling — deep and yet ephemeral — felt more important and bigger and much more adult than what I felt opening up that remote controlled truck I wanted so badly.

My mother had wordlessly taught me very important lessons on those shopping trips, and ones I try hard to remember every Christmas season. Of course, I learned the wealth of feeling earned by giving, but also the importance of treating everyone the same. We all deserve a Christmas stuffed with gifts and ringed by love; we all want this, regardless of station in life. We are all only a few steps removed from being a card on a charity’s display in the center of the mall — and wouldn’t we want the same from others?

I love that from my position behind the bookstore counter I can play Christmas elf for all my regular customers: offering suggestions, reminding them they bought that picture book last year, doling out two sentence-long reviews. Although I am heavily steeped in the material aspect of Christmas, I like to think I’m still making someone’s Christmas better by giving them the tools for imagination and escape, creativity and understanding, generosity and compassion.

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When I got home I called my dad and cried. Then I went to a Guy Fawkes party in Crown Heights at the house of someone whose name I’ve forgotten, though I do remember they had a chicken coop in the front yard. I stalked around the bonfire all night, angry, drinking straight from a wine bottle. The next afternoon I posted on Facebook: “Sleeping the till-noon sleep of the unemployed.” Not long after, I came home.

It is fitting then, that on the anniversary of the day my brief tenure in New York began to collapse, I am featured in a short film about my hometown’s downtown revival. Six months after I moved home from New York, I got a job here, at Main Street Books. Once I was ready to take over as manager, I had another interview with the shop’s owner, John Fernyak. At the end of what had been, I felt, a successful interview, he said “I need you to commit to two years here.”
I balked at that and equivocated. “I can try that!”
“I need you to commit to two years.”
“Ok, sure!”
“[…]”
“[…] Yes, I can be here two years.”

When I first started here, it was nothing more than a job. I was still planning on leaving again for some undefined “bigger and better” opportunity elsewhere. But the longer I worked in downtown Mansfield, the more the area grew on me and the more I grew to be part of the community.

“Community” was a word I had bandied about a lot before — usually in combination with the words “writing” or “literary” — but it wasn’t something I had ever felt before. In Mansfield, I began to understand what the word truly meant. It wasn’t really a conscious decision on my part; it was more a necessity of survival. If we don’t all work together here, nothing works. For me it began with the first downtown scavenger hunt, when 20-some stores worked with me to hide tiny Waldos in their shops and donate prizes for the area kids. It strengthened later with the neighborhood working together for the first time on Small Business Saturday.

Suddenly “community” wasn’t a group of writers pretending to support each other, being inwardly jealous at each other’s success — it was a collection of business owners, employees, customers, and patrons working together for the betterment of the whole neighborhood. This was a feeling I had never experienced in any of the big cities I lived in, and at none of the other bookstores I worked in. It felt like home.

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I picked the thin book out of my monthly shipment, read the back and thought to myself, this is going to be important. Turns out it was important enough for the publisher to move the pub date up from October 13th to July 14th. In the wake of the church killings, the police violence, and the riots in Baltimore, this little book on race said a lot to me, a white girl who has never had to think much about race before. It said a lot to many people, some of them my friends on Facebook who posted the book, held up by their white hands, in between posts of their white babies and white vacations.

Between the World is framed as a letter from Coates to his teenage son, whose transformative years have rung with violence against those who share his skin color. I do not share their skin color and am one who Coates describes as having been brought up to “hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, believe that they are white.”

This sentence comes early on in the book and made me uncomfortable. Perhaps mostly because I had never even thought about the concept of a race-less society before. Coates also said, in a New York Magazine article, that he is always surprised when non-black folk are interested in his work. But he means other white people, right? Not me? Because I am interested and believe I’m not a racist. Believe.

But then, I do not recognize all the names of the black victims of police violence that he lists and am embarrassed for this. Which person suffered which crime, and would I have remembered if they were white?

What is accurate about me — and nonnegotiable — is that I don’t and cannot fully understand what it is like to be black in America. I can’t comprehend the constant, all-permeating fear for one’s flesh and bones, the most basic thing that makes you you. Coates’ book to his son is how to grow up and thrive in this country in his black skin. It is the body of the black person, he says, that Americans share a “heritage” of destroying.

Of course, I do know a little, by virtue of being a woman. Taking cabs when, if I’d been a man, I would have walked home. Holding my keys like a weapon. Avoiding that one guy at parties who gets too friendly when he’s drunk. I fought with a boyfriend years ago, arguing that rape jokes were never funny, in any situation or permutation, because no matter what it was an attack on a person’s core. The argument started absurdly with a crude, offhand joke involving Looney Tunes characters. While others laughed, it made me crinkle my nose and rethink my position on humor, which had been that everything could be laughed about. By violating the sex, a biological aspect of you that affects your world view and is part of how others see you, and that is awfully hard to change, the aggressor takes away something essential of a woman or a man. Is sex somehow less made-up than race? Maybe this is an argument for another day.

None of these, though, are the same as being afraid of the police, being afraid of “the good guys.” To be aware of my incapacity for knowing may be as close to fair as I can get, living life in this white skin. Although I was at first defensive, I understand when to be quiet and listen. I am happy that other white people are listening to Coates. I feel that listening is not enough, but don’t really know if there is a next step yet.

What I would like to do is tell Coates what a good dad he is. His son is lucky to have a father who is so honest and upfront. It’s terrible that anyone must prepare their children for a truth of violence and inequality, but to be unprepared would be more unfair.

From Between the World and Me by Richard Wright

And one morning while in the woods I stumbled
suddenly upon the thing,
Stumbled upon it in a grassy clearing guarded by scaly
oaks and elms
And the sooty details of the scene rose, thrusting
themselves between the world and me….

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Main Street Books from the book loft

A good number of people come in the store and wonder aloud how great a job it must be to run a bookstore. The answer, in short: it’s a dream job. From here many of these same book-lovers ask how I got into the business, so here’s the history of The Bookstore Lady.

When it first occurred to me that being a bookseller would be a pretty rad way to earn a living, I was a high schooler, and I was in the very bookstore I now run. I was sitting by the window in the book loft on a rainy Saturday, looking down at the alley below. Yeah, I could do this, I thought to myself. And let’s be honest, with multiple-librarian family who dressed their only daughter as a bookworm for her first Halloween, what choice did I have?

Second Story Books, looking deceptively neat

My first bookstore gig was at Second Story Books in Dupont Circle, Washington DC. It carried only used books that were shelved and stacked in every available space and with questionable logic. We had first editions and rare copies that were locked in a series of glass cases, and each had its own set of keys, identical to all the others on one comically large key ring. I never guessed right one on the first try. I was always put on the weeknight closing shift with G–, because no one else could stand him, but I would listen to him talk about his cats.

The Globe Corner Bookstore, whose bookshelves looked like sea-worthy galleons

A few years later I got a job at The Globe Corner Bookstore in Cambridge, Mass, which carried travel guides, travel literature, and maps of everywhere. The store was arranged geographically, and to this day I know where Togo is because of where it was shelved in the Africa section. We each had our specialty, and I had a lock-down on domestic and Canada travel; my coworkers were much more adventurous. Tall blond Dan played drums in Central Africa, got bed bugs, and learned traditional dances. Vegetarian Nicole nearly starved on a trip to Iceland. Sweet Lisa chased down a mugger on a train between Hungary and Romania and beat him with the purse he’d snatched.

The PowerHouse Arena, sans celebrities

When I moved to New York City I worked at PowerHouse Arena, a bookstore in DUMBO, Brooklyn that sells art books published by PowerHouse Publishing plus an eccentric collection of kids books and paperbacks for adults. All the other booksellers were really aspiring authors. My manager was from Germany and all her requests sounded like insults. The store hosted big-name authors who I smiled at from afar, and one morning when I was the only one there, Benicio del Toro bought a book of Helen Levitt’s photography.

When I moved back home to Mansfield, it seemed only natural to gravitate toward Main Street Books. I was right; it was the only possible next chapter.

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Main Street Books is again teaming up with The Richland Carrousel Park and Richland Source. The event runs July 1- July 31, is FREE, and open to all.

Bananas! As created by Lou Graziani, www.GrazianiMultimedia.com

Now, allow us to introduce Bananas the Monkey, Mansfield’s Pioneering Primate! You’ll recognize Bananas from the Richland Carrousel Park where she hides beneath the giraffe’s leaf saddle. There’s only so much you can see from under there! Bananas is a curious little monkey and wants to see the sights, but she would like some friends to go with her. She needs an intrepid group of explorers to help her discover our city. We have hidden Banana’s picture all around downtown — find as many as you can in the month of July to prove your adventurous spirit. On August 1st at the Carrousel, Bananas will pick her exploration team. Welcome to the jungle!
How to participate:

• Check out the Richland Source interactive exploration map of downtown Mansfield showing all the stores hiding a picture of Bananas.
• Pick up the paper map and checklist of businesses at Main Street Books or the Richland Carrousel Park.
• Find Bananas in the participating businesses and get your map stamped or signed.
• When you collect 10 signatures or stamps, visit Main Street Books to receive your Bananas Badge!
• Come back to the bookstore when you’ve collected 20 signatures or stamps and give your name to be entered in the prize drawings.
• If you visit every location, come to the bookstore for your special reward!
• Come to the Bananas Bonanza on Saturday, August 1, 2pm at the Richland Carrousel Park for fun, food and prize drawings. Must be present to receive a prize.

The scavenger hunt is a fun summer event for the whole family. Explore downtown and see what all it has to offer. Give us a call with any questions!

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