Ring in 2020: MoonPie Over Mobile, Fairhope’s Ball Drop and a Week of Holiday Wrap-Up Events

The last week of 2019 stretches the holidays out across South Alabama, with light shows still glowing, post-Christmas cruises sailing and two very different midnight countdowns planned for Tuesday night. Families looking to wring one more memory out of the season have no shortage of options, from the biggest party in downtown Mobile to a family-friendly ball drop across the bay in Fairhope. Here is how to finish the year.

Downtown Mobile hosts its signature New Year’s Eve celebration Tuesday night: MoonPie Over Mobile, centering on the giant 600-pound electric MoonPie descending over St. Francis Street at Royal. The night includes a laser light show and fireworks at midnight, plus the traditional cutting of the world’s largest edible MoonPie and a second-line parade led by the Excelsior Band, the brass ensemble that has been a Mobile institution since the late nineteenth century and has become as closely tied to the city’s identity as azaleas and Mardi Gras.

The electric MoonPie drop has grown into one of the Gulf Coast’s most distinctive countdown traditions. Instead of lowering a crystal ball as cities do in New York and elsewhere, Mobile sends a giant illuminated MoonPie — the snack cake that local Carnival krewes made famous as a parade throw — down above the intersection of St. Francis and Royal streets, in the heart of the downtown entertainment district. The celebration has become the anchor event of the city’s holiday calendar, drawing revelers from across the two-county region and beyond to ring in the new year with a treat that visitors can hold in one hand and a party that stretches for blocks.

Organizers filled in the evening’s full lineup in the days before the event. Food trucks circle Bienville Square starting at 8 p.m., weather permitting, giving the early-evening crowd a chance to eat before the countdown crowds thicken. A Resolution Wall at the corner of St. Joseph and St. Francis streets invites revelers to leave their hopes and dreams for 2020 behind, turning the downtown blocks into something between a street festival and a community scrapbook as the night unfolds.

Live music plays in the Riverview Hotel Courtyard through the evening, which also hosts a Roaring ’20s Costume Contest. Costumed entrants gather between 8 and 8:30 p.m. for judging before a second-line parade to the Main Stage announces the winners. Prizes for the top three costumes include a night at the Battle House Hotel, a gift certificate to the Urban Emporium and tickets to the Crescent Theater — a lineup of prizes drawn almost entirely from downtown Mobile landmarks, fitting for a party staged around them.

Across the Bay in Fairhope

Fairhope stages its own family-friendly countdown starting at 8:30 p.m., when Big Night Dynamite takes the corner of Fairhope Avenue and Church Street ahead of face painting, fireworks and the city’s annual ball drop at midnight. The Eastern Shore celebration is built for early bedtimes and young families, with the entertainment beginning hours before Mobile’s downtown festivities reach full swing and wrapping up right at the stroke of twelve.

The Fairhope ball drop has become a fixture of the city’s holiday calendar, giving Baldwin County residents a way to celebrate without crossing the Bayway on one of the busiest driving nights of the year. Downtown Fairhope’s compact streets, lined with shops and restaurants that trace their roots to the utopian single-tax colony founded there in 1894, let families park once, walk to the corner of Fairhope Avenue and Church Street, and walk home again when the ball falls — a small-town scale that has made the event a favorite for parents who want the countdown experience without the downtown crush.

Holiday Lights Run Through New Year’s

Several of the season’s biggest displays stay open through year’s end, giving latecomers one last chance to see the lights without the Christmas-week crowds. Bellingrath Gardens’ Magic Christmas in Lights glows nightly through Dec. 31, closed Christmas Day. The display, staged along the paths of the former estate of Coca-Cola bottler Walter Bellingrath on the Fowl River south of Mobile, has become one of the region’s signature holiday attractions, with light scenes reflected in the ponds and camellia walks of a garden that has been open to the public since the 1930s. Visiting before Dec. 31 is one of the easiest ways to walk off the week’s heavy dinners, and the after-Christmas dates are traditionally among the quietest of the season.

Christmas Nights of Lights runs through Jan. 1 at Hank Aaron Stadium, the ballpark off Moffett Road that has hosted professional baseball in Mobile for decades. The drive-through format means families can take in the show without leaving the warmth of the car — an appealing option on the season’s colder nights, and one that keeps the display accessible for visitors from across Mobile County as well as travelers passing through on I-65.

In Baldwin County, Wales West keeps its Arctic Express steam train rolling Friday through Sunday evenings, a narrow-gauge ride through the lights of the Silverhill property that has turned a working steam railroad into a winter destination for families from Foley, Robertsdale and the surrounding Eastern Shore communities. Down the road in Foley, Santa holds court at OWA’s North Pole on weekends into December’s final stretch, with a pancake brunch option for last-minute visits. OWA, the amusement park and entertainment district that opened in Foley in 2017, has quickly added its own layer to the region’s holiday lineup, and the weekend Santa visits give families a reason to combine a birthday-season ride night with a Christmas tradition.

Together the displays mean that South Alabama families can still catch serious lights long after the wrapping paper is thrown away — a spread of options from a formal garden on Mobile’s southern edge to a ballpark near the interstate and a steam train in the Baldwin County pines. For residents who spent Christmas week traveling or hosting out-of-town family, the stretch between Dec. 26 and Jan. 1 has quietly become a second holiday season of its own, with each venue offering a different way to close out 2019.

Post-Christmas Outings

The Perdido Queen fills the gap between holidays with a Christmas murder mystery cruise Thursday, Dec. 26, featuring Bay Cities Improv, then returns Friday evening with live music from Remix and dinner by Dauphins for its festive dinner cruise. The riverboat outings give locals a chance to see the waterways between Mobile Bay and the Perdido River from a deck chair rather than a windshield, and the back-to-back format — improv comedy one night, live music and dinner the next — is aimed at two very different crowds: families with out-of-school children and couples looking for a grown-up evening.

Culture picks up quickly after Christmas as well. Government Street United Methodist hosts Sacred Harp shape-note singing Dec. 27, drawing on both the 1991 “red book” and 2012 Cooper “blue book” editions. Shape-note singing, a communal a cappella tradition that has deep roots across rural Alabama, gathers singers around a hollow square to sing at full voice with no audience and no rehearsal — a participation-first format that welcomes newcomers, and one that South Alabama has kept alive through generations of singing conventions and school-day singings.

Mannheim Steamroller brings its Christmas show to the Mobile Civic Center Sunday, Dec. 29, performing the album that started it all live for the first time. The group’s blend of electronic instrumentation and classical arrangements turned 1980s-era holiday music into a touring institution, and the Civic Center date gives Mobile audiences a chance to hear the record that launched the modern Christmas-concert circuit performed in sequence on a big stage rather than over a radio. For many families, the show has become as much a part of the season’s final week as the light displays and the leftovers.

The Civic Center has long served as Mobile’s indoor gathering place for touring productions that are too large for theater stages, and a Christmas show arriving between Christmas and New Year’s fills a stretch of calendar that hotels and downtown restaurants otherwise brace to see empty. Out-of-town visitors still in the area for the holidays have historically accounted for a healthy share of the audience at events in that window, making the Dec. 29 date a draw for both locals and relatives in from out of state.

Looking Ahead to January

A few early-2020 items are already on the board for families planning past the countdown. Comedian Darren Knight — better known as “Southern Momma” — plays the Saenger Theatre Jan. 4, bringing the character comedy that has made him a fixture on social media to one of Mobile’s most storied downtown stages. The Saenger, restored as part of downtown Mobile’s revival, anchors the city’s live-entertainment calendar the way the Civic Center anchors its big-ticket events, and a Jan. 4 comedy date slots neatly into the week when South Alabama audiences are looking for a first laugh of the new year.

The same Saturday, The PACT holds a Shrek audition-prep workshop Jan. 4 for young performers. The session is aimed at children and teens preparing for upcoming musical-theater auditions, and it reflects the growing pipeline of youth-theater programming in the Mobile area, where school and community productions have become a training ground for students who later go on to larger stages. Parents registering young performers should note that the workshop falls on the same day as the Saenger comedy show — a reminder that Mobile’s January calendar fills quickly once the holidays end.

Starting in January, Dementia Friendly Mobile launches a monthly Memory Cafe at the Alabama Contemporary Art Center, offering expressive arts and social time for people living with dementia and their care partners. The program is part of a broader national movement to build communities where families affected by memory loss can socialize without stigma, and its location downtown at the contemporary art center puts it within easy reach of caregivers across the city.

Also this week, before the new year arrives: the Mobile Kwanzaa Committee celebrates community and heritage Thursday, Dec. 26, from 3 to 6:30 p.m. at the Virginia Dillard Smith/Toulminville Branch Library, with food, fashion, poetry and music for families. The Toulminville library event has been a neighborhood mainstay of the Kwanzaa season, and its afternoon timing makes it accessible to families who also want to catch the Perdido Queen’s evening cruise or one of the region’s light shows afterward.

Taken together, the week’s calendar captures how South Alabama closes out a year: a brass band and a 600-pound MoonPie downtown, a ball drop on a quiet Eastern Shore corner, steam trains and drive-through lights, a murder mystery on the water and shape-note singing in a church sanctuary. Whether residents mark midnight under fireworks at St. Francis and Royal or at home with family, the last days of 2019 offer plenty of ways to arrive there — and the first days of 2020 are already booking themselves solid.