Carolers are set to sing, bells ready to ring, toy soldiers have their marching orders, and the horse-drawn carriages are dolled up to roll out once again on Ridgefield’s Main Street, all a-sparkle with lights.
It’s time for the Holiday Stroll, time for Ridgefield’s village to bloom into boisterous, bustling life, full of families, shoppers, strollers, couples, kids, parents, grandparents, teens.
Now a well-established tradition, the Holiday Stroll is an event when Ridgefield’s merchants and shopkeepers make it a point to outdo themselves each year and bring to life the festive, joyful, magnanimous spirit that seems too often to sleep in people’s hearts from January to late November.
This year the Stroll is a three-day affair — Thursday, Friday, Saturday — so folks will have lots of opportunity to appreciate the different holiday faces the Downtown Ridgefield organizers have planned and plotted to put on.
The Holiday Stroll is, of course, a gift-shopping promotion by Ridgefield’s commercial village. Each year townspeople are urged to “shop Ridgefield” — at the Stroll, and in the days before and after. It’s a point worth making again. The town’s businesses are so much of what make Ridgefield the place people move to, show off to friends and relatives, a place people love to be.
The Holiday Stroll is one more emphatic declaration that Ridgefield is a town, not a corporate suburb. Ours is a community where business supports teams and charities, people look after their neighbors and everyone can come together to help out folks in need. Be loyal to that town.
This weekend, come to Ridgefield’s village and start the season with a generous helping of the spirit that can make a December’s visit to the shopping district not a chore but a celebration.