On the eleventh day of Christmas, my true love gave to me – Small Town Main Streets

Christmas in the big city is full of hustle and bustle, the air alive with festive energy. The big city also has crowds, traffic, and odd odors of questionable origin. Give me a small town with it’s quaint charm and friendly locals any day.

Candy Canes & Coffee Beans takes place in the very real town of Newmarket, Ontario.  The heart of the town is it’s historic Main Street, where It’s Bean A While serves coffee to customers Ash knows by name. There’s nowhere he’d rather live. The coffee shop may be a figment of my imagination, but the street where it resides is on an actual map.

I’ve lived in the area in and around Newmarket for most of my life, and at the moment, I live less than a two minute walk from Ash’s Main Street. Although urban sprawl has slowly made my town more of a suburb of Toronto than the small town it used to be, the downtown area still maintains its simple roots.

Main Street, along with the connecting Riverwalk Common and Fairy Lake trail, make downtown Newmarket an absolute jewel. At Christmas, night skating on the outdoor rink is illuminated with thousands of clear lights, and nightly events draw people from town and beyond. Tonight, when I went to take photos, they had free cotton candy, while a mini-train took children on a trip around the Commons. Did I mention free cotton candy?? Although I will warn you…eating the sweet fluff off of a paper cone when it’s windy is a challenge and I’m sure hilarious to onlookers. Oh well…free cotton candy!

In the summer, restaurants put out small patios and the rink is transformed into a water feature that doubles as a splash pad. Saturday mornings host a huge farmers market, and rarely does a weekend go by without some kind of festival. And no, I do not work for the Newmarket Tourism.

Why in the world would I create a fictional place when I had a perfect setting outside my front door?

Until tomorrow all!

Saxon