The Internet Is A Bad Neighborhood

 

On a recent road trip coming northward out of Sarasota we detoured to Jacksonville. After the time in Jacksonville we were in an awkward spot to get home to northern Georgia. If only using the interstates to travel it would have meant going out of the way westward on I-10 to I-75 or heading north on I-95 to I-16 in Savannah and then getting on I-75 in Macon. Logistically it made no sense. I decided the old fashioned way of studying a map and choosing back roads was the better option and would be more interesting. Off we went across the Okefenokee Swamp in southern Georgia zigging and zagging through Waycross, Alma, Hazelhurst and many other towns. It was a fun drive, with no traffic and no stress. I would do it again and maybe change it a little to see new towns unseen.

I am still attempting to visit every one of the one hundred and fifty-nine counties in Georgia which is the second most to Texas in the number of counties. I do not have many left as I have visited well over a hundred of them. On this trip I added Bacon, Appling, Jeff Davis and Dodge counties to my total. I feel like I have been to more counties in this state than the politicians that claim to represent it.

 

On the drive I kept thinking about simpler and saner times. Country roads have a way of stripping away the man-made artifices, modern technology and information overload and the troubles of the world that really have no direct bearing on my life. The roads passed through the endless pines, the green fields, by the barns, over the creeks, rivers and swamps and by houses large and small. I like to think of the countryside as reality and cities as artificial bubbles.

The American flag at rest on Broad Street in Monroe, Georgia. Photo by me, April 2026.

When President Carter died in 2024 I watched his funeral. Some of my motivation was a sense of obligation since he was, like me, a son of Georgia, but mostly it was admiration that made me watch. Carter's presidency has felt like the end of simpler and saner times in part because it was the end of the 1970s and also because of the person he was, the son of a South Georgia farmer. His funeral was more than his own, it was the funeral of the last vestiges of simpler and saner times in America and decency too. I would like to think that one day this country will be sane again, but that would require both sides reversing their charge to the extreme ends of politics and returning to where some of us live in the middle. I have no hope of it happening. I love this country, am proud of it, but I think we are fucked by both sides who are too blinded by their smugness and self righteousness for the foreseeable future and perhaps the remainder of my life. It did not have to be this way.

 

"Nor had topsawyer's rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselves to Laurens County's gorgios while they went doublin their mumper all the time." - James Joyce writing about Dublin, Georgia on the opening page of Finnegans Wake. 

 

Dublin, Georgia. Photo by me, April 2026.

 

Dublin, Georgia. Photo by me, April 2026.

Dublin, Georgia. Photo by me, April 2026.

I recently stopped in Dublin, Georgia in Laurens County for the first time. I had a good dinner in their pleasant downtown. The restaurant was busy, people were out on the sidewalks in the evening and it was good to see another small Georgia town's downtown thriving. 

 

Monticello, Georgia. Photo by me, 2026.

Monticello, Georgia. Photo by me, 2026.

Later, before making the final leg home we stopped in the square of Monticello. It is another small Georgia town with a downtown that thrives. I have watched several sunsets in the past few years from that square on my way back from other places. The back roads seem to take me through there no matter from where I was coming. There is something so peaceful and calming about that square at sunset. The world feels okay there.

I have noticed this many times, but in small towns life still feels sane and normal for the most part. There is a great divide between small towns and the cities much like American politics. It is in cities and large suburbs where people ignore out of fear or complacency the crazy, the bad manners, incompetent drivers, dangers and the growing incivility of American life. Small towns are where the life and the country I knew growing up still exists in large part. It is weird for me to feel this way as it requires me to admit that I was wrong for decades of my life when I thought cities were better.

I wish American cities were cleaner, safer and more polite, but they are not and it should not be tolerated or accepted and yet it is. Is it apathy by the citizens, the local governments and police? Yes and it is up to them to take responsibility and solve those problems. In bad neighborhoods people say to look the other way and are told to mind their own business. Looking the other way is cowardly and shreds any sense of community which leads to bad neighborhoods. If taking care of one's community is not minding one's own business and is not in one's own best interest then nothing is.

Somewhere near Milledgeville, Georgia John Cougar Mellencamp's Small Town played on the radio. I sang along. I thought about my mother, she was a huge Mellencamp fan. The world was okay on that back road and in that reality. 

 

Me on the beach in Sarasota, Florida. April 2026.

 

With that written and after walking miles around a lake on Monday, I am putting my long form blog, Notes from Rabbit Tobacco Field, on indefinite hiatus. I am deep into writing my next novel and I do not have the spare mental capacity to keep writing long form posts for a blog. I have to concentrate on novel writing.

Another reason, is that I do not desire for my blog to become what I disliked about the men of the previous generation who talked back to the television news and complained about everything. I notice the men of my generation do it on Facebook or other social media and I find it negative and annoying. I do not want to contribute to that type of discourse on the internet nor waste my time consuming it.

Also, I have been pulling back my time from the internet in general. My use of the internet for any purpose has declined significantly over the last year. I spend very little time on the internet surfing or browsing as if I have seen the end of the web and it is suffocated with bots and AI. The web I started with in the mid 1990s that was human, cool, interesting, filled with originality, was mostly friendly and not so commercial is dead and has been for a long time. The greatest invention for the average person in my fifty plus years of living was ruined. It did not have to be this way. The internet became the ultimate bad neighborhood.

Finally, I like my privacy more than this blog. The internet's influence on society and the current politics are enough to make a person become a misanthrope and to be thankful for the gates that we have control over.

This website is not dying, but changing and will still serve as my primary outlet for my books. I will keep posting periodic updates about my next novel.

Thank you for reading,

Chris M. Vise

 

The Absence

 

A church in Greensboro, Georgia. Photo by me, March 2026.

Above is the handsome 19^th century Presbyterian church on Main Street in downtown Greensboro, Georgia. Last week I admired it from the curb. The proportions of it were perfect and I could not stop looking at it. It is inevitable with me when I admire an old building I think of the quality of the construction and architecture. I wonder why construction and architecture became lazy and cheap and we stopped building quality buildings. I am not alone in this thinking, nor is it novel, plenty of others agree with me. Even churches, which should be inspirational, are today mostly built like aluminum metal shacks, more interested in quantity of square footage and parking spaces over quality. It is not as though constructing a building was any easier in the 1800s than compared to today. I suspect one of the reasons for this degradation in architecture is speed and the desire to have everything faster despite it not being better. Clothing and music are the same too.

Back to my moment in the sun on a weekday afternoon in the grass in Greensboro. What I remember most about that moment was the peacefulness. It was not quiet as Greensboro hummed along beside me on the street, but it was the absence of loud intrusive noise. There were no explosive car mufflers, thumping bass stereos pumping out aural garbage (I am still waiting for a car to pass blasting Mozart or Bach at extreme levels) and there was no cell phone conversation pollution. The streets were not empty, it was a nice day and pedestrians walked and cars and trucks rolled by, but all of the ugly, antisocial modern noise was absent. It was so absent that I noticed it.

Perhaps it was a rare moment and Greensboro, founded in the 1780s, is plagued like every other place with rude noises, but as someone sensitive to noise, it was like time travel to more quiet and civil times. My age is showing, I suppose, I had the same feeling about the absence of noise standing on a dirt road in Oglethorpe County near Smithonia several weeks ago. In that moment on the dirt road, all I heard was the wind in the trees and that has been my favorite moment of this year so far.

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Yesterday there were snow flurries at home. It has been awhile to see flurries flying in March, the transitional month of winter to spring prone to wild and temperamental swings. It was nice.
 

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The cast of the Czech movie Waves.

I watched the 2024 Czech movie Waves last night. It was stylish, smart and entertaining and in stark contrast to most every movie nominated at last weekend's Oscars. Modern American movies are not appealing. They are as degraded by speed, laziness and ugly noise as architecture, music and clothing. This is the era of the absence of taste and civility. I realize I am missing an American culture that no longer exists or it does and I do not see it represented. The more a culture becomes cheap, loud and emotional then, the more unstable and less intellectual it becomes.

Welcome To Gay, Georgia

 

A homecoming of sorts for me. Photo by me, February 2026.

I may have never been to me (hat tip to Charlene and The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert), but I can now say that I have been to Gay.

  

I would be lying if I did not admit that I had a good laugh as a gay man when I entered the town of Gay, Georgia. You cannot go through life without a sense of humor and if one does not possess one then it must be a miserable existence. On a mild winter day driving south on Georgia Highway 85 through Meriwether County I laughed a few times passing through Gay. It does not take long, maybe five minutes if you get stopped by the town's single traffic light, to pass through the town of Gay but I was born into a lifetime of gay life and happily so. As a Georgia native and a minor geography/history nut, I had known about Gay most of my life, but I had never had the opportunity to pay my respects.

Main Street Gay USA. Photo by me, February 2026.

On seeing the town, I realized Gay was bigger than I expected. I was expecting a tiny community with one or two buildings, but instead it had a small strip of commercial buildings on its main street. It would appear that Gay was long ago a vibrant little town. Its highest population was according to the 1920 census when it had 290 residents. Since that height it has lost roughly two-thirds of its population.

The single Gay traffic light. Photo by me, February 2026.

 

Might make for a good YMCA and make my dream from when I was a little boy in the late 1970s of being welcomed by The Village People come true. Photo by me, February 2026.

Gay has not dried up and blown away in the last one hundred and six years despite the population loss. Though on a nice Thursday in the middle of the afternoon it was dead with no one around except the occasional car passing through.

Today, Gay has two gas stations, a post office, brewery, an antique shop, city hall, fire station and a fancy ass restaurant/farm/accommodation run by a Michelin starred chef. Perhaps due to the name of the town it has been seen in the Netflix version of Queer Eye, season three of another show I have never seen on Netflix called Barbecue Showdown and some of the 2022 film, that I also have never seen, called Till was shot there. For a town of 110 people according to the 2020 census that seems like a lot. Also, twice yearly is the Cotton Pickin' Fair, which for Meriwether County seems like an odd fit since very little cotton is grown there as the county ranks eighty-six among the ninety-two counties in Georgia that grow cotton.

Imagine a rainbow mural by the doorway. Photo by me, February 2026.

 

Not all roads lead to Gay, but some do. Photo by me, February 2026.

That is Gay, Georgia, a small place with a happy name along the back roads of the American south. Taking the road less traveled does make all the difference.

Went With The Wind

 

The Graham-Simms House. Photo by me, November 2025.

My true reason for stopping in Covington last weekend was not to see the original Boar's Nest on Flat Rock Road, which still exists today as a church, but was to attend an estate sale and do book research. 

The house hosting the sale was located in one of the historic districts and was built in 1839. It was located on Floyd Street and is known as the Graham-Simms House. The house was built by Dr. William P. Graham. During his ownership, the house was the site of the first meeting of the board of trustees of Emory College (Emory University now) located in nearby Oxford.

James P. Simms

It was also the boyhood home of Confederate General and state legislator James P. Simms. His father, Judge Richard Lee Simms, purchased the house in 1850. The Simms family owned the house until 1919 and it has since changed hands numerous times over the last century. 

The house in August 1969. Photo from the state archives. 

 

In the 1920s the original large portico on the front of the house was replaced by a smaller columned porch as seen today. The grandeur of the house continued to fade and during the 1960s and 70s the house like many large old homes of the time was divided into apartments (the Ginn Apartments) before being converted back to a single family residence. According to newspaper archives the Ginn Family lived on the first floor and rented out the second.

The estate sale was impressive with many museum quality pieces from bronzes, paintings, porcelains and furniture. I enjoyed touring the house more than I did looking at the price tags which were inflated even with a discount on the third day of the sale. The house drew a crowd with cars lining both sides of Floyd Street and with so many people inside it was difficult to move around the halls, rooms and stairs. I saw lots of looking, but not much in the way of buying, though many of the most collectible items were already marked as sold.

A striking quadriptych hung near the top of the stairs. In older homes, I have noticed more triptych paintings and mirrors than quads. Photo by me, November 2025.

Photo by me, November 2025.

The house had fortunately kept many of its original features including several stained glass windows and a wonderful circular staircase rising from the main entry hall. Since the house had been divided into apartments many years before it was surprising to see the original lathe and plaster ceilings and walls in place.

Photo by me, November 2025.

I found the drapes Carol Burnett used as inspiration for her legendary Went with the Wind! sketch for her 1976 CBS TV show.

Standing in one of the downstairs rooms a teenage boy, without a phone in his hand, asked us if we were collectors. We said no, but that we have been involved enough in antiques that we knew enough about pricing and certain makers and styles. The boy said that it was the most beautiful house he had ever been into. I replied that it was pretty extraordinary and a bit over the top for my tastes. I was glad that someone had thought enough to bring the boy to the sale and the he had some appreciation for it instead of being bored out of his mind like many teenagers would have been.

In the rear of the house was a courtyard garden which was private from the other nearby houses. It reminded me of the gardens found at homes in compact Savannah or Charleston.

Not once was I bitten on the neck, put under a spell, involved in a crime spree, offered moonshine or compelled to yell "yeehaw" as I ran from the cops. Covington is really not Hazzard County, Mystic Falls or Sparta. It would be too easy to stereotype the town as some southern relic of time stood still, though it makes a good backdrop for those cliches to play out on the big screen. We are fortunate to have many of the older towns in the eastern part of Georgia that were settled before Atlanta architecturally preserved.

A busy Madison on a Saturday afternoon on W. Jefferson Street. Photo by me, November 2025.

After the sale, we headed further east to browse antiques in Madison. It was crowded and the shops were decked out for Christmas.

The abandoned Nolan Mansion between Madison and Bostwick. Photo by me, November 2025.

Heading north through Morgan County we passed the Nolan Mansion still standing and rotting away.

A cotton pickin' good time. Photo by me, November 2025.

On the way to Athens we went through the cotton fields of Oconee County. The cotton is always so pretty and looks like snow this time of year.

Every town has the old train station and few have passengers. Photo by me, November 2025.

Later we passed the old train station in Winder. The closest passenger stops near here are Atlanta, Gainesville and Toccoa.

That was my fall Saturday in the south.

Standard Time

 

Photo by me, November 2025.

Radiohead's Daydreaming from A Moon Shaped Pool played as we headed west out of Dawsonville, Georgia en-route to Ellijay. We were on a mission to buy apples and cider doughnuts, look at the mountain foliage and maybe, if the weather held, enjoy a hike. I craved the trails and the smell of fall. It was not looking good for the weather, light rain was on the radar to the west and clouds were banking up against the Appalachians. The weather models had said not to worry that the weather would hold until evening, but reality was not looking so favorable. The trees were putting on their best show, much better than last weekend when we were up here and the leaves were weak with color that looked like dried pea soup.

I was digging my head out of reading David Foster Wallace essays. People have made so many moral judgments about him since his suicide in 2008 and one-sided details of his personal life were revealed that his writing has fallen out of favor. People put others on pedestals and realize that they should not have done so and topple them. Or could it be they learned that people are complicated and imperfect? The time had changed or fallen back one hour. Standard time arrived and it is my preferred time with early sunsets and longer nights when daylight no longer needs to be saved. Standard time should be permanent time.

Decks Dark played.

Radiohead has been one of my favorite bands since the magical period of music in the early 1990s. I first saw Thom Yorke on MTV in Creep with his short, bleached hair and looking oddly sexy. He smoldered. My desire for him was like Cobain in that I could never tell if I only found him attractive from certain angles or if my attraction was fooled by the hairstyle. Yorke's physical beauty has not aged well since and “sexy” would not be a word I would apply to him in his late fifties. He is five years older than me, but I never had sexiness to lose and I was also never a rockstar.

 

Photo by me, November 2025.

The countryside unfurled on the twisty Georgia Highway 52 that is married to the southern border of the Chattahoochee National Forest. The first raindrops smacked the windshield as we passed the sunflower farm that we visited five years ago when COVID-19 was still the threat du jour and people were masked outdoors. It felt silly even then to be outdoors in a mask, but I was pragmatic, responsible as adults should be and fearful. I would not even eat inside a restaurant until the summer of 2022. It feels so much longer than only three years ago.

 

Photo by me, November 2025.

Clouds rolled over the mountains. We passed the turn to Mt. Oglethorpe. I was still hopeful about the weather. Three years ago in a mask felt more distant than the clouds atop the mountain and the early 90s. Getting older and standard time is the past disordered, out of sync, scattered memories mixed up on the floor and leaves on the ground. Life is a straight line, but the human mind is nonlinear.

Ful Stop played.

 

Photo by me, November 2025.

We stopped at the first apple place we saw. It was comically painted red, white and blue. It was photogenic in the drizzle and temperatures in the upper forties. Gray weather and gray times. In the gravel lot in my Columbia fleece, Mexican made Levi's jeans and American made Brooks running shoes I tried to connect apples to the American flag theme. No signal in my head and I shrugged it off. The rain kept the crowds low or back closer to Atlanta in the exposed bulb lit food halls selling craft beer and noodles. We went inside for apples. This was not our regular place that we visit every fall, but new things were needed. Piles of apples looked at us and the disappointment was simultaneous between us. We were of one mind and turned and left without apples. We would buy them down the road. 

 

Photo by me, November 2025.

The sky sagged. It was loaded with rain. A model failure and the rain unleashed on us. Knobs were adjusted to warm the car. Rain streaked windows and the hope for a hike drained. The cold and dim world closed in around our capsule of warmth. At least the leaves were pretty and we had apples. The Cartecay River appeared out of the trees next to the car. Someone told me once it had the cleanest water in the state, but I do not know if that is true. What is the truth from a stranger's mouth and what is false? It is okay to not know everything and it is okay not to believe everything too.

The Numbers played.

When will the next Radiohead album be released? A Moon Shaped Pool came out in 2016. It is not that fans will forget the band or that I imagine the band being worried that they need to release an album to stay relevant, but I would like to hear some new music from them. They challenge my ears, stimulate me, sometimes depress me and they never have bored me.

They are the only rock band that I do not mind maintaining an active, albeit slower, career into their older years. I do not see them as an embarrassment to still be on stage on a tour around the world. The band is not a cashing in, nostalgia act like the Rolling Stones or those other bands from the sixties, seventies and eighties. Radiohead's music always seems to stay new and maybe that is because the music has been ahead of everyone else their entire career and we still have not caught up.

Photo by me, November 2025.

Present Tense played.

Internet rumors are out there that a new album is coming, sometime, possibly in 2026. The band is beginning a limited European tour this month going into December. The shows are sold out. I am ready for new music from the band who is possibly the only band who would excite me to hear a new album. Nine years in my mixed-up memories have passed since the band's last album. I was younger, still not sexy, was spending a lot of time in Grant Park, hiking, swimming, dancing and buying apples in the mountains.

Ellijay, cradled by the ridges, sat in the pouring rain. We circled downtown. Tourists dashed for doors and warm tables. We debated whether to eat or leave in the early mountain darkness. I said something about the 80s and coming through here when it was nothing. I noticed that I am saying stuff like that too often the older I get. “When it was nothing” or “when it was cheaper” or “when it was different” and sometimes “when it was better.” My mother smiled in my mind around 1990 and took a bite of an apple behind her big sunglasses. I held the camera into 1991. Tom Cochrane's Life is a Highway was fun with the windows down.  My mother was funny, easy to be around and I missed her. The present or the past, the carousel of memories was the same on standard time. We retraced our miles home down the highway in the falling leaves.

 

True Love Waits played. 

Me in the fall of 1990 around Ellijay. I am glad I gave up on the mustache.

Tin Roof Rusted

Statham, Ga. Not the love shack, but a nod to the B-52s from nearby Athens. Photo by me, April 2025.

The last weekend of April, the sun was strong, almost summer strong. It was Sunday and we loafed into the town of Statham, Georgia, fifteen miles outside of Athens on the old Atlanta Highway. Father John Misty played on Bulldog 93, the local alternative station. In my mind thoughts turned over about an interview with the late writer David Foster Wallace in which he stated that what great artists do is “fracture reality.” I am not a Foster Wallace fan or disciple. I am of the mind that if one dared look, reality is fractured plenty and it is the job of the writer to make something of that chaos. The uncomfortably smart Foster Wallace was by his own admission and by contrast an anti-realist writer who thought of himself as avant-garde and postmodern. Yet, I did like his phrase, fracture reality.

A funky little shack. Statham, Ga. Photo by me, April 2025.

We had passed through Statham a few times and never stopped, but this day it was our destination to browse through an antique store with creaky floors and that old building smell of spiced, slow decay that I enjoy.

 

Photo by me, April 2025.

Statham, founded in the late 1800s in Barrow County, was once a railroad stop and cotton town with a hotel. The trains stopped stopping and the town is now mostly known as a speed trap. Those shiny police cruisers do not pay for themselves after all and if they could find a way to ticket the freight trains, they might. I saw more cops than citizens that Sunday as I stood on the treeless sidewalk wanting for shade. I looked around and decided this town waited for a reason to still exist other than for writing tickets to people going to Athens from Winder and vice versa.

 

"Sometimes even now, when I'm feeling lonely and beat, I drift back in time and find my feet down on Main Street," Bob Seger in the 1977 song Mainstreet. Photo by me, April 2025.

Photo by me, April 2025.

The antique store, as it turned out, was like most antique stores with few antiques and old discarded stuff piled up that was better suited for a flea market. Such is the story of modern antique stores that are anything but. The business model of these places is dependent on nostalgia which they hope will bite you in the ass like a hungry chigger and make you buy something you do not need. Maybe it is that old Hess truck you had as a boy that you left outside in the rain and mud and forgot about by the time you turned nine years old? Or maybe there is a dish your mother or grandmother had and cooked some Betty Crocker casserole in the late seventies or eighties? As if buying that Corningware with the pale blue flowers will satisfy an inner hole that cannot be filled. Are you craving that beef stroganoff over noodles yet? Antique stores in old railroad towns and the vintage shops in the city prey on that weakness. Whether it is a good deal or has any value depends on how deep that sentimental hole is inside you. But let's not lie to ourselves and call these items antiques and I will never not feel silly calling this stuff "vintage," as if I were brainwashed by a lazy, idioctic social media influencer recycling "content."

 

The Statham train station. Photo by me, April 2025.

"Going back to a simpler place and time," Midnight Train to Georgia by Gladys Knight and the Pips 1973. Photo by me, April 2025.

Looking in the direction of Athens. Photo by me, April 2025.

In 1991, when I was eighteen, I bought Stephen King's Needful Things, in hardback no less, and now I was reminded of it. This was not Castle Rock, Maine, but Statham, Georgia and maybe there were similarities that Sunday afternoon. I would reread the book if I had not lost my copy in a flood from a tropical storm twenty years ago. As a teenager I read everything by King and put him on my bookcase alongside Dickens, who was my favorite writer. One day I sense that I will walk into an antique/vintage store and find another copy of Needful Things on a dusty shelf and I will fight against the urge to buy it. Thirty-two years have passed since that book was published, so that must make it an antique?

People my age, in their 50s, are likely missing the design aesthetic of American Colonial Revival that was all the rage around the Bicentennial in the 1970s. Hell, I live in an American Colonial Revival house. You know you want a faux wood eagle with spread wings on the wall, a sailing ship on the center of your mantle and a wood cabinet stereo that is big enough to double as a coffin. This was when Americans were proud to be Americans; we loved our fireworks, disco and short shorts and it was before colonial and all of its variants became dirty words. It was also before that pandering, awful Lee Greenwood song had ever been thought.

The center of Statham and the center of a moment of my nostalgia. Photo by me, April 2025.

America was great, I thought as I stood at the “very center” of Statham and I did not need a politician or a patriotic country song to remind me. Here is a wild thought: maybe it was better in the 1970s? In some ways it was and others not.

People must come from all over Barrow County just to see this monument and rub their finger across it in awe as I did. Statham must surely have a reason to exist and maybe one day people will line up for selfies in this very spot like they do at that deodorant stick looking monument in Key West. Until then, this is the fractured reality.

 

Elton John - Philadelphia Freedom

Post Office In Ila, Georgia

 

Photo by me, April 2025.

This post office in Ila, Georgia in Madison County is one of the smallest I have seen in many decades. It reminds me of the small post office that existed in Hiram, Georgia in Paulding County when I was a kid in the 1970s and 80s. 

The population of Ila was 250 people according to the 2020 census.

Bethlehem, Georgia & The Christmas Card Tradition

The post office in Bethlehem, Georgia. Photo by me, December 2024.

Growing up in the 1980s and watching Atlanta television news there were some stories that would be recycled every year during the holiday season between Thanksgiving and New Year. One was the lighting of the Rich's Great Tree in Downtown, there would the annual Hosea Feed The Hungry and Homeless on Thanksgiving, the Christmas parade, the Peach Drop at Underground and at least one of the television stations would assign a field reporter to drive northeast of town to far-flung Bethlehem, Georgia in Barrow County to do a story on Christmas cards. 

Bethlehem, Georgia in 1978 when I was five years old. It looked more like a traditional town then than it does today. The tiny post office then is in the second row on the right. Images courtesy WSB-TV archives at the University of Georgia.

Bethlehem, Georgia in December 2023 and December 2024. There is very little remaining of what stood in the late 70s. It looks less like a town today and more like a wide spot in the road. Photos by me.

I did not know where Bethlehem, Georgia was located when I was a child in Paulding County. I had never been there until a few years ago when I moved out of Atlanta. Now I pass through every couple of weeks on my way to Monroe. Bethlehem is a small town, population seven hundred and fifteen as of the 2020 census, that is more of a community than a true town with a cluster of businesses and sidewalks. It reminds me of where I grew up in another small Georgia community in the 1970s and 80s. Except, Bethlehem has one traffic light and a post office and my hometown did not. My old community has long since been swallowed by the Atlanta sprawl of subdivisions and shopping centers and unfortunately the sprawl is now beginning to edge towards Bethlehem too. I hate to see it happen again as no place in Georgia north of the Fall Line seems to be immune from it.

By Bureau of Engraving and Printing. - U.S. Postal Service; National Postal Museum: 1967 Christmas Issue

There is a special Christmas tradition that this little town just off the newly finished exit off Highway 316 is known for: the Christmas postmark from Bethlehem for Christmas cards. The tradition began in 1967 and at the time included a special issue postage stamp from the United States Postal Service which has since been discontinued. The special postmark still includes the Three Wise Men and the Star of Bethlehem and reads, 'Greetings from Bethlehem.' During the first Christmas season, the tiny post office that employed a postmaster general and one part-time employee handled 500,000 cards and letters. Over three dozen temporary employees were hired to handle the volume.

Over the decades since, I wondered if maybe the tradition had waned, but when I mailed cards this past Sunday, the slot for out of town mail was stuffed full. It was a happy sight for me to know that people were still sending cards and sending them out of Bethlehem for the postmark. In a time when the cheap spectacle reigns supreme over value and people cannot seem to be bothered with most traditions anymore like dressing appropriately for funerals and weddings it is surprising to know that this one continues.

Every year my family sent out Christmas cards and I still carry on the tradition though I never receive a single card in return. The last year I received a card in the mail was in 2003, the last Christmas my mother was alive. I refuse to let the tradition die that I see as a way to acknowledge someone and wish them well during the holidays without relying on a soon to be forgotten social media greeting. I wrote about my memories of Christmas cards last year.

 

Merry Christmas, season's greetings and happy holidays to you.