To Plan A Trip

Contact the Berkshire Visitor’s Bureau (800-2375747) or the Stockbridge Chamber of Commerce (413-298-5200; www.stockbridgechamber.org ) for a calendar of events and phone numbers for local inns. The Red Lion Inn (413-298-5545), right in town, is decorated for Christmas beginning December 1, and a pianist and a harpist play carols in the lobby. For something quieter, call the Egremont Inn (413-528-2111) in South Egremont or the Williamsville Inn (413-274-6118) in West Stockbridge.

For lunch, head to Theresa’s Café on Main Street, whose Tshirts remind patrons that it was “formerly Alice’s Restaurant,” celebrated by ArIo Guthrie in his 1967 ballad, when Stockbridge had “three stop signs, two police officers, one police car” and a dump that closed on Thanksgiving.

For exhibits and events at the Norman Rockwell Museum, call 413-298-4100, or consult their Web site: www.nrm.org. All 322 of Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post covers are currently on display, along with about 60 original paintings. Stockbridge’s “Main Street at Christmas” festival is held this year on the weekend of December 1-3. The town’s historic houses are open for tours that Saturday; on Sunday from 1:30 to 3:30, antique cars assemble on Main Street to help re-create the setting of Rockwell’s painting.

Before leaving town, be sure to visit Stockbridge’s Old Burial Ground, the final resting place of generations of Fields and Sedgwicks, along with Mum Bett, a slave who in 1783 sued the state of Massachusetts for her freedom and won. Her epitaph reads: “She was born a slave and remained a slave for nearly thirty years. She could neither read nor write yet in her own sphere she had no superior or equal. She neither wasted time nor property. She never violated a trust nor failed to perform a duty. In every situation of domestic trial, she was the most efficient helper, and the tenderest friend. Good mother, farewell.”