All Dressed Up For Christmas

The State Botanical Gardens of Georgia in Athens. Photo by me, December 2022.

Christmas in Georgia is rarely white, but it can be cold as it was last year with lows at my house in the single digits and afternoon highs in the twenties for several days. The cold was refreshing and it made wandering through the state botanical garden light displays in Athens a more festive experience. More commonly it is a cool and cloudy holiday here. This year it will be a wet Christmas with rain expected from late Christmas Eve through the day after Christmas. I would have hated that forecast as a kid, but as an adult I am quite okay with the cozy weather.

 

Dahlonega, Georgia. December 2023.

 

People would likely disagree with me, but last Saturday the 16th in Dahlonega, Georgia the weather was near perfect with heavy drizzle falling and a temperature in the middle forties. I was there to see the lights and browse the shops on the square and so were many others from the crowds and traffic I encountered.

 

Dahlonega, Georgia. December 2023.

Dahlonega, Georgia. December 2023.

Dahlonega, Georgia. December 2023.

Dahlonega, Georgia. December 2023.

Dahlonega, Georgia. December 2023.

The lights were pretty, but not overwhelming. I saw prettier houses on the drive over through the city Gainesville than I did in Dahlonega. The mountain town north of Atlanta and just out of reach from its exurbs has been in the spotlight this year after being mentioned in Southern Living Magazine for the Christmas decorations and events. The mention was picked up by Atlanta television stations and the crowds flocked up Georgia 400. After going, I speculated if it was not some type of paid promotion to drum up tourism in the slowest of all seasons in the Georgia mountains. Had I not seen the stories on the Atlanta news websites, I probably would not have gone. I enjoyed myself, had a good lobster roll from a food truck vendor, but I was not impressed with the lights. Dahlonega is not my favorite mountain town anyway and the shops there are not on par with another mountain town, Blue Ridge.

Dahlonega has an interesting history besides being a former gold mining town, there was a bit of a scandal there in 2017. This story, in the U.K.'s Independent newspaper is quite kooky and worth the read.

Also last weekend I visited one of my favorite towns, Madison, on Sunday.

Madison, Georgia. Photo by me, December 2023.

Madison, Georgia. Photo by me, December 2023.

 

 

Madison, Georgia. Photo by me, December 2023.

Madison is a small town I would feel comfortable living in. It has a charming and refined beauty about its downtown with several good shops and many fine old homes. The people have been friendly on every visit. A shopkeeper remembered me from my previous visits and finally asked if lived there or if I had family that did.

 

Madison, Georgia. Photo by me, December 2023.

Madison, Georgia. Photo by me, December 2023.

Madison, Georgia. Photo by me, December 2023.

Madison, Georgia. Photo by me, December 2023.

 

Some of the shop windows were wonderfully decorated for Christmas.

Madison, Georgia. Photo by me, December 2023.

Madison, Georgia. Photo by me, December 2023.

These are a couple of the many grand homes in Madison decorated for the holidays. The town has the appearance of what people would consider the Old South or antebellum style. 

I have been busy, like most people, dashing to and fro this month. I have been down to Atlanta two or three times during this period.

Phipps Plaza in Atlanta. Photo by me, December 2023.

Santa taking requests at Phipps Plaza in the city.

Sometimes the best way to see Christmas lights and enjoy the sights is to loaf around in the evenings and at night between the planned activities.

Dusk in Bethlehem, Georgia. Photo by me, December 2023.

I pass through the small town of Bethlehem, Georgia once a week. Growing up in Georgia, I remember the annual news story that ran every December on the Atlanta television stations. It was the story of people making the drive to Bethlehem to mail Christmas cards for the Bethlehem postmark. Since mailing cards has declined I suppose people no longer visit the post office there in the numbers as they did decades before.

Photo by me, December 2023.

A nicely decorated home in Monroe, Georgia.

Photo by me, December 2023.

Photo by me, December 2023.

Photo by me, December 2023.

Every small town is all dressed up this time of year with Christmas lights. Monroe, Georgia does a simple but pretty job with their thriving downtown.

Season's Greetings And Christmas Cards

Some 1980s Christmas cards from WXIA-TV Atlanta that I received during my time affiliated with them from 1985 to 1990. Signed by Johnny Beckman, Guy Sharpe and other meteorologists and staff.

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 Growing up in the 1970s and 80s, it was common to see the phrase “Season's Greetings” on Christmas cards, advertisements and other decorations, but the phrase dating back to Victorian times seems to have fallen out of usage or I seldom seem to encounter it any longer. My mother seemed to favor it for our family Christmas cards and I remember as a child seeing it the most often compared to other popular phrases like Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays. 

 

Without fail and with enjoyment, my mother sent out Christmas cards every December. Revco, Zayre, K-Mart, Richway, Rich's or from wherever she got them that year. I was there with her, going through the boxes in the aisle next to the wrapping paper, until she asked me what I thought and she decided on just the right one. Some years it was a reindeer, a sleigh, a bird or barn in the snow or Santa with a bag of toys slung over his shoulder that she chose. Sometimes we agreed and sometimes we did not.

Christmas cards from my childhood home in the 1980s.

 

The tradition was for her to retrieve the red address book from the telephone table in the living room and sit down to write out a stack of cards intended for friends and relatives. People got them even if she had not seen or spoken to them during the year; she was going to think of them for the moment it took to write their name.

 

The addresses rarely changed as people did not hop from house to house like the nomads of today seeking an upgraded kitchen and twenty car garage, except for a crazy aunt of mine who was constantly marrying, divorcing and moving. Houses are no longer homes, but investments and there are more people in Georgia than I ever would have imagined as a child. You could write my name and Route 5 Dallas, Georgia without any other numbers or a road and the mail carrier would have known exactly who I was and where I lived thirty or forty years ago. Not so today.

 

Christmas cards on a fireplace mantle in my former Louisville home. Photo by me, December 1996.

I sat next to my mother on the sofa and watched and waited for my turn in our conveyor belt Christmas card operation. Her handwriting was much prettier than mine; I am a left-hander and she was a righty, so she did the writing. My job was to stamp and seal the envelopes after she had signed the cards and filled in the address. Some television show would be on the background that neither of us cared for or in the seventies, she would have the Elvis Christmas LP from 1970 playing on the wood cabinet stereo.

No one interfered with us, as it was likely there was no one else around. When the writing, stamping and licking were done, we would drive to the post office in Dallas and I would run inside and drop them through the slots marked "Dallas Only" or "Out of Town."

A 1970s Christmas card from my great grandmother and great uncle in Visetown, Tennessee.

I do not imagine a scene such as that often plays out in contemporary life. Children have little interest in anything that is not on a phone screen and the same could be said of adults too. Christmas cards have been replaced by social media posts that sound like they were written by public relations firms and accompany an over stylized family photo in front of a Christmas tree or a summer beach vacation at Destin or Panama City at sunset with everyone dressed in white. The smiles will be wide, the hair will be blown, the sand will fill every wrinkle and the sunburn serious. Were these people stranded in the desert? After all, there are appearances to keep up and as I said to someone recently, everyone on social media appears to be happy and living the best life. Much show must be made of every moment at that very moment.

Most people of my generation and older will think of the Christmas card as an artifact of our past lives. Younger generations likely do not think of Christmas cards at all because they have probably never signed one. The Christmas card can be considered The Ghost of Christmas Past warning Scrooge to remember the innocent Christmas spirit that he possessed in his youth, lest he die miserably and sentenced to become a ghost chained up like old Jacob Marley. It might be Dickensian to hold the antiquated Christmas card in high regard or give it such powers of sentimentality. As a fan of Dickens, I fondly remember the cards as much as the parties more than I do any G.I. Joe or Star Wars action figures that I received as a present under the tree. Receiving a Christmas card meant that you mattered or were thought of, even if it was only for a moment. There was a human connection in the handwriting, the brief words written, the tearing open of the envelope and the licking of the stamp.

There is no human connection in the 'like' button or the heart icon underneath the thumb holding a screen. You might as well keep scrolling for the next video or selfie or time-wasting piece of content.

Half of the enjoyment of Christmas cards was receiving them in the mail. I liked to see the variety of cards that people chose and the handwriting styles. After opening the cards, they would be placed on the mantle above the fireplace, where they would sit until after the new year, when the decorations came down and were boxed up. While they were there for a month, I would look at them and be reminded of that person and imagine our card sitting on their mantle. The lifespan of the Christmas card was another part of the tradition. The unsatisfactory modern equivalent of social media posts cannot be perched on a mantle or satisfy my need to tear open an envelope. Their lifespan is less than a second, as it is scrolled by and never seen or thought of again. Such is contemporary digital life, where nothing endures.

 

The Lenox Square tree in 2007. Photo by me.

Similarly, Macy's killed off the Rich's Christmas tree tradition after seventy-four years in Atlanta. I have been to Lenox Square twice since Thanksgiving this year and the Christmas spirit was lacking and some of that was not seeing a Christmas tree atop the Rich's (it'll never be Macy's to me) store. It was a tradition I grew up with, even in years I did not see the tree in person at the Rich's flagship downtown store on the crystal bridge or when it moved to Buckhead, as the night of the lighting was always broadcast on television. In my lifetime until now, it has always existed and so from my perspective, it should always continue to exist. Tradition is something humans grasp onto when other aspects of life shift with the times and become unrecognizable. They are reassurances on cold, windy nights that some things still matter and are constant when little else behaves in that manner.

The last Christmas card my mother sent me four months before she died.

The season's greetings are not mailed anymore, but are more likely Instagrammed and forgotten. Traditions require too much time, thought and effort in the age of instant and constant gratification. This is how traditions fade out little by little with the passage of time and people. I still send Christmas cards and I will keep sending them until I can no longer find them in the stores or have no one to send them to.

 

Shorter Days, Reflections On A Year

 

Photo by me, January 2023.

The shorter days of fall and winter are my favorite days. I like the late morning sunrise and the growing darkness that begins by four thirty in the afternoon when the sun slides behind the tall trees downhill toward the river. Inside our cozy homes with lamplight, some of us hibernate behind books or for others, in front of a glowing television or phone. I have mostly been ensconced at a computer screen, finishing the first draft of my third novel. I completed that this month.

It is thirty-seven degrees on the fence underneath the crepe myrtle as I sit at my desk and write this at eight o'clock at night with a hole in my sweater. The roses are finished for another year and they bow their last blooms to the morning frost. Shorter days and longer nights - I like the trade.

2023 has gotten away from me like a misplaced sock hiding somewhere underneath a bed. I rambled around the South with trips across Georgia and out of state to North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Tennessee, Kentucky and Alabama. Mississippi was neglected this year, but that is usually the case. There was no long-distance trip to some unfamiliar place this year, but I did not have that most precious commodity known as time. 

Thoughts have turned inward to reveal what was underneath the fleece throw of the mind. 

It is perilous to think that with the aches and pains of age, experience and the nectar of knowledge that we have it all figured out or that we know the truth that others do not, but that is complacency fooling us into having too much self-confidence. Sometimes there is little difference between the blinders affixed to a horse and the ego of the human mind. One lesson that life teaches us over and over is that we do not know everything. Life is good at humbling reminders. Every person is a student from birth until death.

The approach that works best for me is to go through life with the perspective that I know less each year, I am less certain of my beliefs and it is best to try and retain a childlike sense of wonder.

 

The caught off guard me. Charleston. August 2023.

I thought a lot (what's new?) in 2023. I wrote through most of the year, excluding my summer blockade. I had serious doubts about whether I wanted to write this novel. It is complicated, it is sad and it is full of tragedy and stupidity. The humor and the high moments are scaled before gravity says not so fast. A number of years ago, there was a public service campaign with the slogan, "it gets better." Maybe it does for some and maybe we all get there in our own time, but I would be dishonest to say that it always does. 

 

What was the solution in these years that I have written about and was the escape foiled again? Did I keep running like the boy at the beginning of Dweller On The Boundary or keep driving like my mother and me in Uncivil X? The escape route was planned, but my shoe was untied and I tripped and my mother and I turned around. 

 

In Shadow's Gravity, that is the title of the third novel, does the man stop resisting or break free? Did he make the wrong decision atop the levee in Indiana with the Louisville skyline and a different future staring him in the face? Did he get on the plane to Asia?

I know the answers. I was him.

 

Suddenly I'm on the street. Seven years disappear below my feet. Been breaking down. Freedy Johnston's Bad Reputation

I do not spread my heart like butter on an English muffin with social media, but I went through a serious period of depression this year. Somewhere I took a wrong turn, stepped into it and it was stuck to my shoes. I could attribute it to swimming in the territorial waters of the past to write a book, but I do not know. It could have been as simple as reading too much news or listening to too much Radiohead. As much as we sometimes want answers, we might never have them. Maybe that is why I liked that television show In Search Of as a kid.

 

That is life at the end of 2023 - another year closing, a sentence written and an additional mile walked. It is nothing to be maudlin about; people came and went, there were chance meetings with long-lost faces, lengthy emails, hours-long phone conversations and text chats and in between all of that, I became a great uncle as I watched the sunset from the beach.

 

The Christmas decorations are up, the lights are on and the cards posted. The sounds of the Vince Guaraldi Trio's A Charlie Brown Christmas and Mannheim Steamroller's Christmas album from 1984 are the soundtrack to washing dishes, getting the mail, making notes, sitting at a traffic light or sipping coffee. Life has settled here between the Egyptian cotton sheets, the wool socks and crossing off the last days on the calendar before it begins again. Somewhere in time, I am sliding around on the leather backseat of my father's Cadillac and Paul McCartney sings my favorite Christmas song. It is cold and I cannot wait to get home and sit in front of the fireplace. Heavy-lidded and drowsy, tired I am and in need of a good sleep. The life has been drained from another year.

Thank you for reading. I hope you have a merry Christmas, happy holidays and I wish you the best for 2024.

 

 

The planned, the unplanned and a few moments I shared and did not in 2023.

Some place far from anywhere that I'll probably never write about in detail.

The favorite moments of 2023 occurred in the absence of social media. Driving down a gravel and sometimes rutted dirt road in search of a ghost town on a March afternoon was one. It was overwhelming silence standing there with no phone signal, the mind alert to only that moment and that moment only. Life used to be like that, do you remember?

Somewhere in South Carolina. August 2023.

The same enjoyment occurred in another desolate place in the ruins of a church in the low country of South Carolina. This time was down a road, somewhat paved, but guarded by oaks with Spanish moss draped overhead.

Pensacola. September 2023.

Alas, I love a good ruin. 

 

Chenocetah Mountain. March 2023.

And foggy days.

Birmingham. August 2023.

I spent a lot of time in places that looked like this.

Greenville, South Carolina. August 2023.

You can try many things in a small town, but I don't recommend a certain country song. Try John Mellencamp instead, from a person that actually grew up in a small town. Greensboro, Georgia. March 2023.

Miles were walked in cities, small towns and woods.

 

February 2023.

 

I returned to horseback riding for the first time in twenty-five years.

 

Athens is always good for people watching. June 2023.

There were festivals and some were good and others bad.

Spy the rainbow? August 2023.

I stood on a roof at a private event and no longer recognized an old neighborhood where I had lived.

 

April 2023.

I became obsessed with an abandoned plantation. 

June 2023.

There were botanical gardens.

I spent plenty of time in bookstores and drinking coffee. I listened to stories from others and told a few.

Somewhere in South Florida. April 2023.

 I napped on an island and swam too far out. 

 

Asheville, North Carolina. March 2023.

 

I discovered invisibility in Asheville. Listened to Bach. An ex emailed me out of the blue while I made hotel coffee. A long lost friend appeared. I bought a gigantic book of old New Yorker cartoons.

 

I returned to New Hope for the first time in almost twenty years.

Down In The City

 

Atlanta at the Brookwood Split looking south. Photo by me, November 2023.

Today was the first time I have been down to the city since August when I was at Ponce City Market and the Beltline. It was a gloomy day with mist in the afternoon and it was quite nice. I was hanging out in West Midtown and Blandtown. I still have a kernel of fondness for the city, especially when it is gloomy, but I do not want to live there again.

Otherwise, I am locked away at home being very productive with the next novel due in 2024. Atlanta and my life there in the 1990s and early 2000s are apart of this book. Much of what I have written is critical of the city during that time, though in some ways it might have been a better city then than now. It was certainly more relaxed and laid back during that period compared to today and some of that criticism could be extrapolated on a national cultural level. The skyline with the new buildings is nice to look at, but generally life in the city proper is not that appealing at street level.

Photo by me, November 2023.

Some of the smaller scale new construction, like this in Blandtown, is hideous and cheap looking. This residential building looks like three shacks stacked atop each other or maybe an overcooked french fry. It also has no relationship with the street other than the cookie cutter stencil style mural. However, I would imagine the price is anything but cheap.

Photo by me, November 2023.

Many years after being built, the 17th Street bridge remains a complete abomination for pedestrians.  Imagine walking across that concrete wasteland in the heat of summer with all of the pollution from the traffic wafting upward and no shade. The only redeeming value of the bridge, besides traffic management, is the view of the skyline.