2023 Christmas on the Coast Ornament Pokes Fun at Bankhead Tunnel’s Famous Truck Crashes

This year’s “Christmas on the Coast” ornament for the City of Mobile celebrates a local landmark — and, with some humor, the trucks that famously get stuck in it. The 2023 design features the Bankhead Tunnel, complete with a truck crashing into the entrance of the tunnel, which has a 12-foot height clearance.

Mobile’s Chief of Staff read a proclamation on behalf of Mayor Sandy Stimpson declaring it the official 2023 Ornament of the City of Mobile. The ornament is the 30th in a series of limited-edition holiday ornaments produced by Goodwill Gulf Coast, with proceeds funding the organization’s community programs — including early intervention services, employment services and job training, and educational and social services that help individuals and families overcome barriers to economic well-being.

Ornaments are available at Goodwill Gulf Coast retail stores, online, and from select Gulf Coast vendors in the Mobile area.

The choice of subject is a characteristically Mobile mix of civic pride and self-aware humor. The Bankhead Tunnel is one of the city’s most recognizable pieces of infrastructure — and its truck collisions are one of the city’s most reliable running jokes. Generations of drivers who misjudged the tunnel’s clearance have left their marks at the entrance, where warning signs and over-height signals line the approach and the occasional stuck box truck still brings Government Street traffic to a halt and the internet’s attention to Mobile.

The tunnel behind the joke

The Bankhead Tunnel carries Government Street traffic beneath the Mobile River between the city’s downtown and the waterfront near the Alabama State Docks. Opened in the early 1940s and named for Alabama Senator John H. Bankhead, it was an engineering landmark of its day, letting vehicles pass under one of the busiest working harbors on the Gulf Coast without waiting for a bridge or a ferry. The tunnel’s portals curve down toward the water, and the transition from open street to enclosed tube is where over-height vehicles meet their match — the entrance geometry, combined with the posted clearance, has humbled drivers for more than eighty years.

The truck-into-tunnel tableau has become such a fixture of Mobile life that it lives comfortably alongside the city’s more traditional images of azaleas, oaks and Mardi Gras. Social media posts featuring a fresh casualty at the tunnel entrance circulate regularly, and local businesses have long sold T-shirts and other items riffing on the theme. The 2023 ornament is the city’s own nod to the joke — an official acknowledgment that the tunnel’s reputation is part of what makes Mobile recognizable to itself.

A keepsake among Mobile’s holiday traditions

Mobile’s holiday calendar is fuller than most Gulf Coast cities’, and the ornament series has grown up alongside it. The city lays claim to America’s original Mardi Gras, and its Christmas season carries some of that same flair — downtown decorations along Dauphin Street, events at Bienville Square and the historic districts, and a steady stream of visitors who come for the Gulf Coast’s mild version of winter. Against that backdrop, a small ornament featuring a beloved downtown landmark fits neatly on the list of things Mobile families do every December.

Local keepsakes like the ornament series also serve as an informal archive of the city’s self-image. The subjects chosen each year — bridges, buildings, celebrations — trace what residents consider worth remembering, and the inclusion of the Bankhead Tunnel’s most famous failure says something distinct about Mobile: the city celebrates itself with a wink. It is the same instinct that fills local shops with jubilee-themed prints and Mardi Gras memorabilia, applied this year to a tunnel that eats trucks.

It also fits a broader pattern in how Mobile celebrates its holidays. The city’s Christmas season overlaps with preparations for its famous Carnival season, and Mobile residents have always treated local quirks as material for celebration rather than embarrassment. An ornament that laughs with the city about the tunnel, while raising money for a community institution, manages to be both a keepsake and a punchline.

Three decades of ornaments for a purpose

The Christmas on the Coast series reached its 30th edition with the 2023 design, a milestone that has made the ornaments a collectible tradition for Gulf Coast families. Each year’s piece highlights a different Mobile-area landmark or scene — and because the editions are limited, earlier years have become sought-after items among collectors who try to assemble the full set. The series has chronicled the region’s identity through three decades of change, from the waterfront to the historic districts that define the city’s postcard image.

Goodwill Gulf Coast produces the ornament as its signature holiday fundraiser, and the proceeds stay close to home. The organization serves southwest Alabama with a network of programs aimed at helping people build stable, independent lives. Its early intervention services work with young children and their families during the critical developmental years, when support can change a child’s long-term trajectory. Employment services and job training connect job seekers — including people with disabilities and others who face barriers in the labor market — with skills, résumé help and direct placement opportunities.

The organization’s educational and social services round out the mission, offering programs designed to help individuals and families overcome the obstacles that stand between them and economic well-being. The retail stores that sell the ornament are part of the same system: donated goods sold in Goodwill’s shops fund the job programs, creating the cycle of donations and opportunity that the organization describes as its core model. Every ornament sold, in other words, feeds directly into the work the series exists to support.

Goodwill Gulf Coast, the local affiliate of the national nonprofit network, operates retail stores and donation centers across the region and channels the revenue into its workforce and family programs. For the organization, the ornament serves double duty: it is both a fundraiser and a public reminder of what the agency does, reaching holiday shoppers who might not otherwise encounter Goodwill outside the donation drive-through.

The formal proclamation that accompanied this year’s unveiling is part of the tradition as well. Each fall, city officials join Goodwill representatives to present the new design, and the mayor’s proclamation makes the ornament official for the year — a small but genuine piece of civic recognition that has marked every edition since the series began. With Mayor Sandy Stimpson represented by his Chief of Staff at the reading, the 2023 edition received the same official welcome as its twenty-nine predecessors.

Where to find the 2023 ornament

Shoppers can find the ornament through three channels. Goodwill Gulf Coast’s retail stores across the region carry it alongside their usual inventory of donated and new goods, and the organization sells it online for collectors outside the immediate area. Select Gulf Coast vendors in the Mobile area also stock it, which puts the ornament in local shops where residents are already shopping for the holidays.

The limited-edition format means availability narrows as the season goes on. In past years, popular designs have sold out at some locations before Christmas, and collectors who wait too long have had to turn to secondary markets. Goodwill’s stores typically promote the ornament through the holiday season, and the organization uses the annual launch to remind the public of the programs the purchases fund.

The audience for the series extends well beyond the city limits. Former Mobilians use the ornaments to keep a piece of home on their trees, military families who passed through the area carry the collection with them, and Gulf Coast natives gift the new edition to relatives as a dependable piece of local flavor. Thirty years of that loyalty is what turns a fundraiser into a tradition — each December’s design has to live up to the last, and Goodwill has kept the series going long enough that the ornaments themselves have become part of the region’s holiday landscape.

For Mobile residents, the 2023 ornament lands as both humor and history. The Bankhead Tunnel’s truck-swallowing reputation is an inside joke the whole city is in on, and putting it on an official city keepsake is a way of marking the year with something genuinely local — not a generic sleigh or snow scene, but the specific, slightly absurd charm of a harbor city that has learned to laugh at itself. That the joke pays for early childhood services and job training along the way makes it an easy one to buy into.

The 30th-anniversary edition joins a series that has become one of the Gulf Coast’s quiet holiday institutions: three decades of landmarks rendered in miniature, one proclamation a year, and a fundraiser that turns civic affection into services for the people who need them most. This year, it just happens to come with a truck in the wall.