Main Street

Shop, but don’t drop
This week – as the smart-alecks say – is when we take time to give thanks for what we value, then spend time trampling each other to buy junk we don’t need. Maybe we ought to alter our perspective.
National chains are now competing to see who can open earlier and ruin more employee Thanksgivings. It started a few years ago, when Black Friday sales launched at 6 a.m. the day after the holiday. Then, they moved the sales back to midnight.
Now, they are just opening Thanksgiving Day, no doubt offering respite to a few dysfunctional families who would rather shop than eat, but making life miserable for retail employees who have to forego a day off with family.
Don’t do it. Take a day off on Thanksgiving. If you can’t get with family or friends, maybe you can go for a hike, spare a smile for a cop on duty, or just turn off the TV and read.
If you want to do something nice and still go shopping, wait until Friday and stay local. Healdsburg and Geyserville shops are locally owned, and the day after Thanksgiving is the launch of the holiday season. The Healdsburg Plaza is decorated, the shops will stay open late, and you can stroll downtown and see friends.
A dollar spent in a locally owned business goes three times as far as a dollar spent with a national chain, and those local bucks support your friends and neighbors.
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The news that Healdsburg may have been home to a Nazi sympathizer was shocking. The local Patch website reported on this more than a year ago, but the San Francisco Chronicle picked it up in mid-November, after the New Yorker ran an article on a Hungarian Nazi who renounced his anti-Semitic views after finding out that his grandmother was Jewish and had been held prisoner in the Holocaust.
The New Yorker noted that a notorious anti-Semitic Hungarian website was registered in Healdsburg to a guy who owned a small shop. The fellow who owned the Red Paprika spice shop is off the grid, and told Patch that he just handled the registration as a favor to a friend, but he was praised on the website as a supporter of its repellent views.
Whether Red Paprika was a Nazi front or a failed specialty shop is immaterial now, but what bothered me was the Chronicle’s use of photos of the current tenant, a gift shop called Gathered, to illustrate its story. For the record, Gathered owner Cindy Holman and her partners are nice folks who were as surprised as anyone at the sordid connection to Hungarian creeps.
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John & Zeke’s update – the new bar location, at 420 Healdsburg Avenue, will not be open in time for Thanksgiving due to paperwork issues, but should be open in December. The new bartop was installed Monday, the refurbished sign will be on the building soon and lots of little details are being worked out.
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A few weeks ago, I called U.S. Senator Ted Cruz a moron, which inspired a reader to write a letter taking me to task for name-calling. Still another reader emailed me to point out that I have no evidence that Cruz is a moron. That’s true, and I take it back. In the future, I will defer to the wisdom of Senator John McCain, who referred to Cruz and Senator Rand Paul as “wacko birds.”
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I’m often first in line to blame the state for anything and everything, so I have an obligation to give state folks a cookie for good deeds. A Tribune reader wrote me a couple of weeks ago, complaining about the trash along the Highway 101 onramps and offramps. CalTrans had the underbrush cut along the freeway last month and the newly bare ground exposed plenty of trash and debris. I forwarded the reader’s e-mail to Maddy Hirshfield, District Director for Assemblyman Wes Chesbro, and the cleanup crews were out the next day.
Ray Holley is admittedly stingy with his cookies. He can be reached at ra*******@gm***.com.