Brilliant!

Your whole commentary had me laughing out loud – albeit uncomfortably. I live on the entire other end of the continent and have not been to Celebration, but from what I’ve read about it, your description seems right on. And certainly it’s consistent with similar, smaller-scale developments I’ve seen – they’re creepy, romanticized, hyper-sanitized renditions of a small town America that never actually existed.

Finally, I think that the presence or absence of a bookstore is a perfectly valide litmus test of legitimacy.

Great post.

I’m always amused by the strong feelings that are evoked when some people express their views of Celebration, Florida. I’ve recently moved to Celebration in July 2006 and have heard both the positives and the negatives of this town but I believe that reality is somewhere in between.

I love the idea of living in a town where you can simply walk to the Town Center and ‘have a night out’. Restaurants, movies, parks, playgrounds are all a short stroll away. My three and five year old have only to walk across the street to go to a playground or play in the grass park. Sidewalks are large and there are endless places to wonder.

But with all these ‘good things’, it is just a town. Your neighbors are really what make a neighborhood great or terrible. I do find it much easier to meet neighbors because I am much more likely to see them walking around also. But this is only a good thing if you have good neighbors. So far we have been very lucky, but we were very lucky where we lived before so I can’t say that my ‘new town’ is so much better than my ‘old town’.

Celebration isn’t for everybody. Some of my closest friends would probably hate to live here. They would rather spend the same amount of money and live in a bigger house with a bigger yard. When we bought our house we knew that we were paying for the town as well as the house. Although the standard suburban house and neighborhood is not for me, I certainly have nothing against this type of living. I probably feel the same way about the standard suburbs as they do about Celebration, “It’s a great place to visit but I wouldn’t want to live there”.

So, in some ways I agree with the other comments of Celebration. I do wish that there was a large bookstore to go to. I also wish that there was a hardware store nearby but, unfortunately, we have to travel about twenty minutes for either one.

But then again, there has been talk about an ACE Hardware opening soon and there is also the public library in town so I guess we should take what you can get.

All in all, I’m very happy that we moved here.