Every December, along the storefronts of downtown Fairhope, a set of painted wooden panels tells a Christmas story twice over — once in the Twelve Days of Christmas verses themselves, and again in the century-long story of a town that refused to let its public art disappear. The Twelve Days of Christmas series has become one of Fairhope’s most legendary symbols of the season, and its journey from lamppost to landfill-and-back is a study in how a small city keeps its traditions alive.
Dickens on the Lampposts: How It Began
The tradition starts in the 1950s, when Fairhope’s city governors invited local artists to create wooden cut-out figures from the characters of Charles Dickens, displayed on lampposts and in storefronts downtown through the holiday season. Fairhope — founded in 1894 as a single-tax colony built on the principle that a community could be a “fair hope” of success — had, from its earliest days, drawn artists and free thinkers to its bluffs above Mobile Bay. Public creativity was part of the civic DNA.
Time did what time does. Years of Gulf Coast humidity, storms, and improvised storage left the original Dickens cut-outs tattered, and through the 1960s and 1970s the city patched the gap with commercial decorations. It worked, but something was lost — and a circle of merchants and city officials knew it.
Mary Hunter and the Forty-One Cards
The revival is dated to 1978, when Mayor Jim Nix, downtown merchants, and interested organizations agreed the original idea deserved new life. Local artists, led by Mary Hunter, began working on art for the 1979 Christmas season. Hurricane Frederick — the catastrophic storm that bulldozed across Mobile Bay in September 1979 — postponed the unveiling, so the new tradition actually began with the 1980 holidays.
What Fairhope’s Public Works Department installed downtown was forty-one painted wooden placards depicting Christmas scenes, created by Mrs. Hunter and sixteen local artists. Hunter herself painted the two-by-four-foot Twelve Days of Christmas cards, and they hung along the city blocks for the next thirty-six years, becoming as much a part of a Fairhope December as the tree lighting and the Pied Piper parade.
Retired, Rescued, Restored
In 2017, a municipal decision changed the city’s signage motif to banners, and the Twelve Days art went back into storage — the second time the collection had been retired. This time, though, the town reacted differently. The Committee to Preserve Fairhope’s Christmas Art (CPFCA) formed the next year to work with the public and other artistic groups to save the traditional Christmas art.
The panels were retrieved from the city warehouse, treated as the historical objects they had become, and refurbished with funding from the Fairhope Arts and Crafts Festival Foundation, with the Fairhope Museum of History managing the project. In 2019 — timed to Fairhope’s 125th anniversary — the rejuvenated work went back on display in storefronts, celebrated as part of the city’s quasquicentennial. The City of Fairhope keeps the cards and has committed to displaying them in downtown storefronts for years to come.
A Tradition With a Mission
The CPFCA’s work didn’t stop with the restoration. The committee’s stated aim is to preserve historic Fairhope art broadly, and its members envision a gallery of historic works — the Christmas cards and other nostalgic pieces — that would keep the community’s artistic roots visible year-round rather than twelve days at a time.
That ambition fits the town’s history. The Fairhope Museum of History, housed in the old city hall on North Section Street, opened in its present role in 2008 and has made the town’s artistic and utopian founding story a centerpiece. Local historians — the story’s research drew on the work of Vicki Cook and historian Bob Glennon — have documented how much of Fairhope’s identity was painted, written, and built by its own residents.
Public art is a tradition in Fairhope, from the founders’ park on the bluff to the murals and sculptures added in recent decades. The Twelve Days of Christmas panels hold a special place in that lineage: they are hand-painted, locally made, and loved enough to be rescued twice.
What Visitors Should Know
The panels return each holiday season to downtown storefronts, hung by the city with the CPFCA’s involvement. A December walk through downtown Fairhope — past the fountain, the bookstores, and the bluff-top park — doubles as a gallery visit, with each two-by-four-foot card illustrating one verse of the familiar song. For many Fairhope families, finding each of the twelve is a yearly scavenger hunt handed down along with the ornaments.
Gratitude is the theme the preservationists return to: to Mary Hunter and the sixteen artists who painted in 1979 and 1980, to the Public Works crews who have hung the panels for four decades, and to the volunteers of the CPFCA, who kept the magic of the original artists’ vision alive for everyone to enjoy.
Why Fairhope, of All Towns
There is a reason the art tradition took root here and not somewhere else. Fairhope was founded on November 15, 1894, as the Fairhope Single Tax Colony, by a party of Midwestern reformers inspired by the economist Henry George. They bought land on the bluff above Mobile Bay and set out to prove that a community could be run on cooperation and a fair share for everyone — they gave the town its name because they believed it had a “fair hope” of success. The colony drew a particular kind of settler: teachers, writers, artists, and utopian-minded freelancers who valued making things over making fortunes. A century later, that founding temperament still shows up in the town’s galleries, its bookstores, its walks and festivals — and, each December, on two-by-four-foot boards hanging in shop windows.
The Twelve Days cards themselves are folk art with a professional’s finish. Sixteen local artists contributed scenes alongside Mary Hunter’s twelve signature panels, and the designs were meant to be read from the sidewalk — bold shapes, bright colors, instantly legible verses. Children who hunted for all twelve cards in 1980 now bring grandchildren to do the same thing.
Keeping a Small-Town Tradition Alive
The restoration story also says something about how traditions actually survive. They survive when someone forms a committee, asks for money, and does the unglamorous work — in this case, the Fairhope Arts and Crafts Festival Foundation funding the refurbishment and the Fairhope Museum of History managing the project. The cards came out of a city warehouse looking like a project; they went back into downtown windows looking like heirlooms.
For the preservation committee, the December display is the visible half of a longer-term mission: documenting, restoring, and eventually exhibiting Fairhope’s historic art as a collection. The idea is that the panels that hung for 36 years shouldn’t be the only survivors — that the Dickens cut-outs of the 1950s, the mid-century commercial decorations, and other forgotten pieces of the town’s holiday wardrobe are worth tracking down before they finish falling apart.
Until then, the panels hang where they have always belonged: in the windows of a downtown that was built by people who believed a town this pretty owed its visitors a little magic every Christmas.