It’s so good to have new people in town joining our committee and invigorating the dynamic with fresh ideas. Welcome! We really liked your suggestion about holding a street fair in the spring to capitalize on the apple blossoms, but I’m afraid that would conflict with the annual Windowpane Smashing Festival, which takes place every year the third week of May.
Yes, I suppose we could hold the street fair before the Windowpane Smashing Festival, but in our experience, people are so busy gearing up for all the smashing—you know: the baking, prepping their smashing tools, topping up bandage supplies—they don’t have time for anything else. Holding a fair after the Windowpane Smashing Festival wouldn’t work either because, well, the windowpanes are all smashed, obviously.
Oh, that’s so cute. “Can’t you smash windowpanes at another time of year?” Trust us, we’ve tried moving the Windowpane Smashing Festival and it doesn’t work. It just doesn’t, that’s why. Maybe they smash windowpanes in the fall where you come from, but around here, everyone knows May is windowpane smashing time.
What? Why do we have a Windowpane Smashing Festival at all? Because we’ve always had a Windowpane Smashing Festival! It’s tradition. Those windowpanes aren’t going to smash themselves, you know!
Look, you’re a reflectioner—oh, sorry, that’s what we call new people who’ve never smashed a windowpane—so I’ll explain slowly: It all comes down to economics. If we didn’t have the Windowpane Smashing Festival, then the local windowpane factory would go out of business. The factory works all year to produce enough windowpanes to replace all the smashed windowpanes. You won’t find people around here going off to other windowpane factories to replace their shattered windows, no sir! That’s our motto: “Smash Local.”
Find other customers? Other customers for our windowpane factory? Oh, look at you with your big ideas about “marketing” and “globalization” and “leaving large sheets of glass intact.” If the factory could find other customers, don’t you think they would? Don’t you think they’ve tried? I mean, I assume they’ve tried, but then why would they when we have the Windowpane Smashing Festival?
So what you’re saying is we should simply stop holding the Windowpane Smashing Festival. I don’t understand. Then what would we smash? Car windows? That’s not the same at all. Completely different type of glass. Terrible stuff. Those beady little bits get everywhere. Do you know how dangerous that would be?
Oh, I see: don’t smash anything. “Don’t smash anything,” she says! Listen, reflectioner, smashing is what we do. We’ve been smashing as far back as anyone can remember. Grover Retchingford, our founder, smashed his first windowpane in 1783. Betsy Stimple, who went on to star as best friend Velba in the Disney Channel series “Oops-A-Doodle!”—the way she smashed windowpanes, even as a toddler, you could tell she’d go far.
You have to understand: our young people are leaving town in droves, running off to the big city with their fancy property laws and unspoiled storefronts. You can’t smash a single thing in the city without getting dirty looks and arrested. Windowpane smashing is the only thing that brings the young folk back home. Like we say around here, home is where the shards is.
Well, if you didn’t want your windowpanes smashed, you should have thought of that before you moved here!
Look, I think we’re getting too hung up on the windowpanes, but there’s more to the Windowpane Smashing Festival than that. There are other benefits. The wooden ladder store, for example. It would go out of business without people buying the ladders they need to smash those high-up windowpanes.
Yes, of course it has to be a wooden ladder to smash windowpanes, that’s just how it is. None of this “metal ladder” nonsense. That’s part of the tradition: going out every year to buy a new wooden ladder.
Oh, we didn’t tell you about Ladder Burning Day? Boy, do you have a lot to learn about our town.