Cherries on a stick!

A cherry is a piece of fruit. It grows on trees, and the bright red color of the fruit makes it very attractive to any person or animal as if the fruit itself is saying, “come hither and eat me.” Cherry pie is a very popular dessert in American culture, and the flavor cherry is used for a large assortment of products such as cough medicine, to chap-stick, to my favorite flavor of Sour-patch kids. So to many people a cherry is just that, a fruit or a flavor. But to me, who lives in northern Michigan, the cherry is a lifestyle. In my town called Traverse City during mid- July we host the annual National Cherry Festival. For ten days, thousands of “fudgies” or tourists invade the streets to enjoy the parades, midway, pit spitting contests, and cups of cherries by the truckloads. Unless you are actually present at the festival you would not believe me with how many products of cherries actually exist in this world. Who in their right mind would want to own a cherry shaped coffee table?

So the sign of this simple fruit, takes on a completely different meaning in terms of culture by location. Many people look at the sign and just see a fruit and have no other emotional attachment to it other than maybe hunger, whereas when I look at a picture of a cherry, I am flooded with the emotion of anxiety just thinking about the connotation I have linked to it. My association with cherries being “crowded”, “greasy”, and “busy”, may not be the conventional associations of someone here in Minnesota who might think “sweet”, “delicious”, and “bright.” The signifier, which is the festival itself, does work by inviting people from all over to come and participate in the events. By advertising the festival, and booking awesome attractions, people would not be interested in attending and if no one attended then a local like myself in Traverse City would not have a negative association of a fruit with annoying and smelly tourists. However, by now linking a fruit to a festival, the thought now of festivals for people who live in Minnesota would be to link my National Cherry Festival to the Minnesota State Fair. And for me to look at a cherry, might be equivalent to someone here looking at a Corndog.