According to Penny Merservier, the parade’s coordinator and the executive director of the Franklin County Chamber of Commerce, Chester Greenwood Day marks “the kickoff to the holiday season and winter wear.” If lumping “winter wear” in with “holiday season” sounds a bit commercial, well, it is—the town’s department store sees 30 times its usual earmuff sales over parade weekend. “The day creates a market,” says Gary Cross, author of Consumed Nostalgia: Memory in the Age of Fast Capitalism. “But it also creates an identity—it gives a town that’s maybe a shell of what it once was a moment of restoration and community.”

Indeed, earmuff production in Farmington is no more. Tourism is now the state’s main industry, and one of its only growing sectors. At its peak, Chester Greenwood’s downtown factory was producing 400,000 earmuffs a year and employed numerous residents. Today, it’s been repurposed into a community hall, and the local department store buys its earmuffs from out of state.

But that hasn’t stopped Farmington from holding an annual commemoration anyway. “A lot of times celebrations are really about what people wish they had,” Cross says.

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Today, the word “nostalgia” carries positive, daydreamy associations, but it was coined to refer to experiences that were terrifying and sad. In the 1600s, soldiers far from home during the Thirty Years War exhibited inexplicable signs of melancholy and homesickness, and some were driven to the point of suicide. The Swiss physician Johannes Hofer was the first to use the word—combining two Greek words for “pain” and “homecoming”—in 1688. In subsequent wars across Europe, nostalgia manifested as listlessness, depression, and loss of appetite. Military doctors and generals suggested the mysterious, and apparently contagious, “disease” could be cured through shaming, death threats, or simply death.

Pure nostalgia hurts—people only feel it when they are displaced, and acutely aware of what they’re missing. The sensation didn’t stay confined to soldiers for very long. In the mid-18th century, the Industrial Revolution disrupted familiar agrarian rhythms. With urbanization came new anxieties—seasonal festivals, and all the social meaning embedded in them, lost their importance, and a newly mechanized society created a class of people dislocated from their own context and heritage. Nostalgia spread to mass culture, and it carried a different pain—instead of just longing for a place, it now also meant a longing for a different time.

In the new industrial age, notes Karal Ann Marling, the author of Merry Christmas! Celebrating America’s Greatest Holiday, “without the rhythms of the agricultural year to signal the turning of the seasons, city dwellers relied on merchandise in the shops to tell them when Christmas was coming.” In the 1800s, retailers in New England began selling greenery during Christmastime as a midwinter reminder of life in the countryside. They quickly discovered that city dwellers had a social appetite for remembering rural life, whether or not they’d actually experienced it themselves. Christmas trees gained popularity, as the idea of plucky young men cutting down and bundling pines was enough to evoke a natural and pure existence—romantic, contained, familiar. Soon, the same impulse popularized mistletoe.