If you’re wondering what a Toyota commercial has to do with books and reading, I promise you, there’s a connection. This year’s new holiday Toyota commercial is a cute one, following the story of a used bookstore that suffers a fire and the young girl who goes around her small town to collect books from residents. Those books are then given to the elderly bookstore owner, Sam, as a holiday present, presumably so his shop can be back up in the new year.

The cute town where the commercial takes place is fictional, but it was filmed in the town where I live. This isn’t the first commercial or even first car commercial filmed here. Bill Murray reprised his Groundhog Day role in a Jeep commercial for the Super Bowl in 2020, a film that was filmed here as well. In addition to those, my town’s been home to the filming of the Sissy Spacek Amazon joint, Light Years, and to scenes from the classic Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. Familiar with Jordan Peele’s Lovecraft Country adaptation? Filmed here. The upcoming Amazon Paper Girls adaptation? Parts of it were also filmed locally.

I don’t live in Hollywood nor even a mid-size city. I’m in a semi-suburban area, right on the skirts of farm country. It’s easy to laugh about a town of 25,000 having so many shows, films, and commercials filmed here, but it’s much funnier once you realize that this is a small town, where people know people, people talk to people, and everyone has something to say or share about the goings on.

Imagine the surprise, then, of the Toyota commercial.

It’s the end of September, and I’m rolling up to teach yoga on a Tuesday night. My town is home to Read Between the Lynes, a few doors down from the yoga studio. As I park by car, I notice this:

There are signs about parking being inaccessible over the next couple of days, but since Light Years is filming and has been filming sporadically, these signs weren’t noteworthy. But otherwise, all that I could see was the facade for Sam’s bookstore, located right across the square from Read Between the Lynes. I sat in my car absolutely perplexed, wondering why another bookstore would move into our small town and why it’d even consider doing so right across from our beloved indie.

I went up to the yoga studio and everyone was talking: it was some kind of commercial being filmed and not an actual bookstore. The commercial’s subject wasn’t known, nor was the company for which it was being made. But some of the students talked about them being approached by the company producing the commercial, as they were soliciting local residences for filming. There was apparently decent money involved for the rights to use and film the outside of their homes.

You’ll see in the commercial what this means: the little girl rings the doorbells at a number of gorgeous Victorian homes in our town, all of which have a nice door, visible porches, and other aesthetically-pleasing features. It’s neat to see some of the best architecture in your community showcased like that, without any alterations or any set built to accomplish what it is that already sets this town apart.

There’s a beautiful shot of the town’s opera house, too, the same one which Bill Murray jumps from in Groundhog Day.

It was surprising, given the fact that all of the locations filmed were locations in town that they didn’t approach our own bookstore to do the commercial with their facade. They chose another building instead, one with a more modern exterior, even though the rest of the scenery and feel of the commercial is nostalgic.

After teaching, I went with one of my friends to check out Sam’s Books . . . as did many other people in town because again: small town. We had some fun peeping which books were in the store and the levels to which they were destroyed by the fire. We didn’t know the premise of the commercial or the company, but we easily figured out the fire aspect as the smoke damage and tape on the glass made it clear.

The store in which this was set up is a small children’s boutique, and if you peep through to the back of the interior, you might be able to see their goods behind it. That might be a little more evident in the following photos, all of which are shots of the window front bookshelves. See if you, too, can figure out what some of the books are.

(Yes, it’s been pointed out that this bookstore is selling ARCs, which was just one more questionable bit of the reality of the entire premise).

The week the commercial was filming in town, my in-laws came to visit, and we took them to eat at one of the outdoor dining restaurants up the square. We finished and took a walk by Sam’s Books, which by that point — Thursday — had been disassembled. They’d been in the final stages of removing the last of the books.

We took them over to Lynes then, where we had to pause to cross the street and where we had to get permission from the commercial team to enter the store. They were filming in front of the door. I stood inside the door with my mother in law while my husband and his dad were waiting to get the all-clear to enter because, as it turns out, businesses in town weren’t told about how the commercial would be filmed, how it would impact their hours or access to their facilities, or that the commercial would take priority to everyday activity.

Perhaps most frustrating, though, was that in our small town, people took to Facebook asking about what was being filmed (not a shock) and when they learned about the fake bookstore, wondered why we didn’t have a real one in town because we deserve it (we have one! We’ve had one for a long time! It’s right downtown!).

It’s funny to watch the commercial back, too, knowing that it was filmed at the end of September. We had a warm early fall, plenty of flora was still emerging, and yet, the commercial was set during the holidays. You can see when the girl is walking around town that there’s not snow on the ground and that the trees are showcasing their early fall colors. Then when you get to the scene where the girl presents the books to the book seller, there’s suddenly snow.

They’d filmed fake snow on the streets and on some of the greenery, but in other scenes, it’s really clear where they didn’t and where it’s obvious this was not a cold season. The girl is wearing a winter coat, mittens, and a hat as she’s going door to door, but the grass is very green behind her.

Here are some other fun little facts and insights from the commercial vs. real life:

• At about 6 seconds in, you see a generic sign for a bakery and a realtor on the exterior of the buildings in the background. They are actually a bakery — with the best cinnamon rolls you can imagine — and a real estate office.

• If you squint  at 28 seconds, that’s where the bookstore’s located — immediately next to the building with the black awning that curves around the corner.

• There are not evergreen trees in the town square, as seen at 39 seconds. They’re big, mature trees, but they’re not THOSE big, mature trees. You can see that in my first photo above, as well as at the five second mark, as that is the perspective in the background from this scene in the commercial.

• This is more Toyotas than I’ve ever seen in the square before — apparently, too, the crew asked around to nice looking Toyota owners if they could use their cars in background scenes.