Opinion: This Summer, Kick the Souvenir Habit

(June 21) -- I might be biased against them, being from New England. Souvenirs don't quite meld with the New England tourism experience. There is something in souvenirs that something in us --Yankee thrift, or our B.S. detectors -- doesn't seem to like.

And that's extended to our visitors: New England has never been huge on hawking souvenirs. Physical ones, anyway. A splurge on a thimble of maple syrup to take home, fine, or a "This Car Climbed Mount Washington" sticker. I've always seen this as a kind of respect for visitors: You just drove up from New York City to look at dying leaves, friend. You've already been ripped off plenty.

Even state laws that require general stores across New Hampshire and Maine to reserve one section for oversized knives with images of bald eagles embossed on them seem perfunctory. I've never seen someone at the counter saying, "Yeah, let me get a medium coffee, the paper and three collectible daggers." No, the items themselves are scenery, their mere availability a kind of amusement.

For better or worse, New England's main export has traditionally tended to be the idea of itself. Or experiences that reflect those ideas. Eat a lobster or ski on an open lake. Or ski down a mountain. Hunting and fishing are even better: Here's a gun. You want a souvenir, go get it yourself.

This New England upbringing might be why the more I think -- I mean really think -- about souvenirs, the dumber I feel for ever buying them. And it's why, with the start of summer upon us, it may be helpful to look at why souvenirs might be the stupidest things I've ever purchased.

We all know the ideal souvenir: some unique thing from a place -- something stumbled upon through that often imagined divine serendipity of travel. Of course, that rarely happens, and that's the void junk souvenirs fill. More often, you stumble into a room of shiny things, remember you need to get something for Nancy and pay $9 for a shot glass.

Every visit to a gift shop is a kind of orchestrated settling, every souvenir a shortcut. No one walks out of a gift shop with the gift he or she was looking for. You find a gift, a substitute for the gift, really, a weak facsimile of what people think gifts are. They are "not-exactly-the-right-gift shops." They are "This is four more dollars than I would like to pay, but it will do" shops.

Souvenirs are not new. Pilgrims on their way to the Holy Land bought them. But contemporary souvenirs are built on the foundation of a necessary, everyday item: a mug or a pen or a towel. You need mugs anyway, so why not a mug that reminds you of that fun place you went on vacation? They're a kind of anti-memento mori -- something to remember how you've lived.

The problem is that these useful items are available anywhere, so it makes the least sense to bring them back from faraway places: "Ahh, Hawaii: the least logical place to go for a bottle opener."

The word "souvenir" comes from the root meaning "to remember." But it's the sellers who are doing the remembering, by simply recalling what items tourists like to buy and then mass-producing those items. A souvenir shop becomes creepy when you look at it as a physical reflection of the psychology of tourists: "My family's unverified coat of arms on a cardboard coaster for 11 dollars in Ireland? I'm connecting with my roots!"

But if it's a sign or logo proclaiming where someone's been that matters, then the only real souvenir you should ever come home with is, well, a sticker.

That's all you really need from a place, a sticker to say you've been there. Then you can just stick it on objects once you're home, on the useful things bought locally, or anything, really. "What's this?" "It's a Disney mug, now." "Here's my Germany toaster." "Oh I love your pool table. When did you go to D.C.?"

Looks like Mount Washington has had it right all along.

Steve Macone -- www.stevemacone.com -- is an essayist and performer. His work has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Boston Phoenix, The American Scholar and The Christian Science Monitor.

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