Brettuns Village Trunks & Leather
Old Trunks, New Leather. All from Maine.
November 28, 2000
Hi Folks:
I guess if you shut your
eyes for a few seconds in the Fall the holidays
are all but upon you once
you open em back up again. Here we are in the
thick of the shopping season,
America’s newest sports/recreation craze.
When I was a kid, about
a thousand years ago, we played outside all day
until Mom would drag us
into the house for supper. These days it seems
like all the kids hang out
at the mall; shopping is their favorite sport.
Mark my words, it won’t
be long before your kids start trading cards with
pictures of Tommy Highflyer
or whatever his name is, along with the other
trendy designers.
I don’t know who the heck they are. So make a pledge
to shun those name brands
this year when out shopping your way into a
frenzy. Visit a local
craft show instead, or volunteer to do something at
a retirement home.
I guarantee that you’ll remember it far longer than
you will those new clothes
or the new gas-powered 48-speed margarita
blender.
This all comes on the heels
of our family’s annual trip to New Hamster
where we stay in a nice
hotel over the Thanksgiving weekend and get our
shopping done in a monster
of a mall. If I estimated correctly that one
area (Nashua) has more stores
than our entire state up here. It was all a
bit overwhelming.
Us Mainers don’t know how to handle it when we have a
choice of more than two
restaurants for supper. So that’s why I was
preaching in the previous
paragraph.
So the leaves are all gone,
there’s some snow here and there, the
venison’s in the freezer,
the last of the pumpkins finally went to mush on
the porch, and we’ve all
noticed that our hands are cold when we’re
working on the trunks in
the shop. Time to fire up the old heater,
apparently.
Trunk sales have been great,
no complaints. We may be close to breaking
the old annual record (218)
this year; we’ll add it all up around the
start of the new year just
for fun. It’s also been a verified
record-breaking year in
the trunk refinishing department (calling it a
department makes the barn
seem bigger), with our annual count falling just
shy of 120. These
are the trunks we refinish for our customers. We’ve had
the darnedest run of painted
monsters coming through lately – all colors
of trunks have been arriving
– white, pink, purple, green (several
different shades including
one very familiar to parents of diaper-age
children), blue, red, you
name it. I’m not sure what the deal is but it
must have something to do
with the way the planets are lined up. The guy
that runs the paint stripping
outfit in town (punchline on his t-shirts:
“Auburn’s Only Professional
Stripper”) is going to appoint me to his Board
of Directors if we keep
dragging painted trunks to him.
Here’s some news – we have
a new line of handles coming, should arrive
next week. These are
shaped just like our standard handles (TH-01 and
TH-03 models) except these
have no slots in them. These are being made in
our standard brown and also
in black. These are priced at $6 per pair,
shipping included, of course.
I know a lot of you have been waiting for
us to get these handles
made; we’ll be shipping them out late next week.
Thanks for your patience.
By the way – our annual total for handle sales
so far this year is an impressive
number, over 400 pairs. That’s a lot of
new handles, and a lot of
envelopes, and a wicked lot of stamp licking.
That’s why I’ve been saying
“Mewwy Chwithmuth” to everybody lately.
We’re still trying to work
out a deal with the local shop class to get
handle end caps made.
The person running that program must have left to
go vote in Palm Beach County.
Nobody’s seen him in a few weeks. I’ll
keep after it.
Our For Sale page is getting
a little thin, but don’t worry, we’ll be
adding more trunks this
week. I’ve got four newly refinished beauties to
add. Haven’t added
them yet because we ran out of space on our host’s
server. I’ve requested
more space – they can’t figure out how to do that,
so I guess we have to find
a new hosting company in the next couple of
days just to get these trunks
added. This whole cyber-thing isn’t all
it’s cracked up to be.
Not yet, anyway.
You know that big deer that’s
the logo of that big insurance company?
That deer lives in our back
yard now. We see him in the late evening
under the pear tree.
What a big fella he is. Jenny (our lab) saw him one
eve a few weeks ago and
she turned around and ran for cover. Can’t blame
her. Drop by and see
for yourself. Biggest antlers I’ve ever seen in
Maine, 12 points, looks
like a horse with two trees stuck to his head.
Happy Holidays, we’ll get
back with you before the 25th.
Churchill Barton
Brettuns Village Trunk Shop
Auburn, Maine