Christmas lights twinkle in a greenhouse in Tiverton, Rhode Island. People haul unwieldy stacks of evergreens from car trunks and the backs of pickups and station wagons through the frosty night. The greenhouse at Manchester Tree & Landscaping pulsates with conviviality while pruning shears snap to the Supremes’ Christmas Collection. It is the night of […]
There’s been a whole lot of talk about the weather lately. It’s been weird all across the country, but particularly here in New England. And many of the old reliable “signs” have been way off — at least so far. I personally had a hint of said confusing weather this past Thanksgiving Day, when I […]
Eastport, Maine, has always looked to the sea for its identity and the livelihoods of its 1,900 residents. When the last of its 18 sardine canneries closed in the 1980s, salmon farming, scalloping, and diving for sea urchins filled in—but the town’s economic life has never ceased being hard and uncertain.
WHEN I WAS GROWING up on our farm in Vanceboro, Maine, during the 1930s and ’40s, my mother always put on a Nativity play for the townspeople on Christmas Eve using mostly members of the family and various animals from the farm. I first participated at about age 5 or 6. My role the first […]
NEW ENGLANDERS WERE always so stuffy about love, sex, and romance, how come it was commonly approved practice for young couples to go to bed together before they were married? And also, more surprisingly, to get married in the nude? Both are true. Young New England unmarried boys and girls would indeed go to bed […]
Not long ago, while watching from my office window the fireman putting up lights on the town Christmas tree here in Dublin, New Hampshire, I began wondering if perhaps New England might lay claim to the very first Christmas tree. Well, the first American Christmas tree. (It is well established that the use of the […]
