See You at the Harvest Festival

 Someone asked me the other day why we have a Harvest and Music Festival when we're not one of the state's biggest producers of cotton, watermelons and tobacco anymore.

What's there to celebrate?

It made me stop and think, and here's what I told him:

While it's true we don't harvest like we used to, not since the days when agriculture was king around here, the need to celebrate hasn't gone away. This year we're celebrating the new businesses that opened up over the last year, and the new jobs. We're celebrating the new commercial bakery and the huge expansion of one of our pharmaceutical companies that together will bring hundreds of new jobs very soon.

We're celebrating another year as one of the nation's most fiscally sound small communities, not to mention our ranking by BusinessWeek magazine as one of the nation's top 10 places to live for affordability and quality of schools. We're celebrating all the new projects that are either just completed, under construction or will be soon.

The Festival is about celebrating all the fruits of our labor this year. So, while we're not growing crops per se, we are growing community, the arts, industry and more. We have reasons to sing a song of celebration, to take our shoes off and dance to the new beat we have created in Clayton, which can be enjoyed by all age groups, both young and old.

That's what we're celebrating.