A coast full of light: December, the Gulf Coast way
When the last of the hurricane-season shutters come down and the first cold fronts push through, coastal Alabama starts to glow. It happens gradually at first — a strand of lights along a Fairhope sidewalk, a wreath on a storefront in Foley — and then all at once, in the first weeks of December, when parades, tree lightings and concerts stack up weekend after weekend from the Mobile-Tensaw Delta to the Pensacola Bay area.
For the communities that stretch along Mobile Bay and the barrier islands, December is not a quiet month. It is one of the busiest on the civic calendar, and the calendar fills with events that have, in many cases, been running for decades. The December-to-Remember holiday schedule that circulates along the coast each year has grown into a catalog of those traditions — a mix of small-town parades, garden spectaculars, symphony concerts and theater productions that together give the region one of the densest holiday calendars in the South.
Bellingrath and the grand displays
Any tour of the coast’s holiday season has to start in Theodore, at Bellingrath Gardens and Home. Magic Christmas in Lights, the garden’s after-dark walkthrough of lighted displays set among the azaleas and live oaks, has been a fixture since the mid-1990s and typically runs nightly from just after Thanksgiving through early January, closing the first week of the new year. Visitors follow a trail past the Reflection Pond and the Bayou Boardwalk, with a new theme and new displays added most seasons, and choral groups from across the region perform on the South Terrace most evenings. For thousands of families from Mobile, Baldwin County and the Florida Panhandle, a night at Bellingrath is the event that marks the official start of the season.
The gardens anchor a Baldwin County calendar that fills nearly every date between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Fairhope’s Christmas parade brings its downtown streets to a standstill on the first weekend of December, and Daphne follows with its own tree lighting and parade the same week. Foley layers a Kiwanis parade on top of its Christmas Fest, Lillian stages Christmas in the Park, and Elberta, Robertsdale and Silverhill each run their own small-town processions down main streets where nearly everyone in the crowd knows someone in it.
Parade season up the bay
Mobile County contributes its own string of traditions. Grand Bay combines its Country Christmas with a Nights of Lights Parade; Satsuma, Dauphin Island and Tillman’s Corner all field parades in the season’s first week. Saraland’s parade, now in its sixth decade, is one of the largest in the county, and Semmes follows a week later. By mid-December the season turns from streets to stages.
The Mobile Symphony Orchestra’s holiday program has become one of the cultural highlights of the year at the Saenger Theatre, and the Mobile Ballet’s production of The Nutcracker closes out the weekends before Christmas at the Mobile Civic Center Theater. The Charlie Brown Jazz Christmas, a Mobile institution now in its eighth decade, keeps the season swinging well past the holiday itself, running the weekend after Christmas.
Across the bay and down the road
The western Panhandle runs its own parallel calendar. Pensacola Winterfest fills downtown with trolleys, tours and lights from early December through Christmas Eve, and the Pensacola Christmas Parade draws tens of thousands downtown in the second weekend of the month. The Pensacola Children’s Chorus stages its Christmas on the Coast concerts at the Saenger Theatre, the Pensacola Little Theatre runs a full production of A Christmas Story through the middle two weekends of December, and the communities north of the bay — Milton and Navarre — light up their own parks in the season’s first week.
In the middle of it all are the events that exist nowhere else. Magnolia Springs, the Baldwin County town built along the only river in the United States still served by a mail boat, holds Christmas in the Park under its canopy of oaks. Bay Minette’s Christmas Fest stretches across two days in its courthouse square. Spanish Fort runs both a tree lighting and a full Spirit of Christmas Parade. And the St. Lawrence Street Christmas Bazaar in Daphne’s Old Town district turns two blocks of historic storefronts into a walking market of local makers the first weekend of the month.
Planning the season
Veterans of the coastal holiday circuit will tell you the trick is to pick your weekends early. The first weekend of December alone can carry a half-dozen parades within a thirty-minute drive of the Bayway, and the second weekend belongs to the big staged productions in Mobile and Pensacola. Parking in downtown Fairhope and downtown Pensacola tightens quickly on parade nights, and the most popular nights at Bellingrath — particularly the weekends between Christmas and New Year’s — routinely sell out in advance.
The other piece of advice is to leave room for the small things: the community Christmas at Sims Park in Daphne, the Baldwin Pops concert in December, the Sugarplum Festival that closes out the Baldwin County calendar the weekend before Christmas. None of them takes long, and together they are the reason the season along the coast feels less like a series of events and more like a single, month-long celebration shared across two states.
Whatever the calendar holds, the pattern along the coast is the same from Grand Bay to Navarre: the lights come on, the bands tune up, and the towns turn out. Another December on the Gulf Coast is underway.