(GPB News)- The holidays are here, and cultural opportunities are popping up across Georgia for the month of December and beyond. These three family-friendly options celebrate both the darkness and light of this winter season.
Ghosts in Savannah
Savannah is famous for its ghost stories and tours that take visitors to spooky locations in the city, but one historic site is going a step further by bringing its haunted spirits to life with the Andrew Low House Museum’s Candlelight Ghost of Christmas Past tour. Museum managers Ginger Varner and Chris Sergi said staff members dress up in costumes as Low family members and notable names of the post-Civil War and Victorian eras.
In addition to the period decorations, candles illuminate the grounds and rooms of the 1840 mansion in Lafayette Square, where tour attendees explore the lives of past residents through their personal artifacts, narrated by the dead.
“We have a few ghosts,” Sergi laughed.
“We have lot of them,” Varner chimed in.
“Mary Cowper Stiles is ghost of Christmas past and then Andrew Low is present and then Juliette Gordon Low, who passes away in the home, as well, is the ghost of the Christmas future,” Sergi said. (Andrew Low was the father-in-law of Girl Scouts founder Juliette Gordon Low.)
The museum acknowledges the site’s dark past: Low enslaved men and women, and tours strive to tell what its website calls “a transparent narrative of the site at the time.”
“We take [visitors] through the past and the stories of the house and its history and then talk about the Christmas traditions that took place in the house,” Varner said.
The tour ends in the museum’s courtyard, where guests are treated to cookie decorating, hot cocoa, and hot cider and are bid farewell by their ghost host, William Makepeace Thackeray, the British novelist who wrote the 1847 serial novel, Vanity Fair.
The tours run from Nov. 26 to Jan. 9, 2025.
In Alpharetta, another Brit is holding sway over holiday this shopping this year, and that’s Johnnie Boden, who founded the popular Boden Clothing brand in 1991.
The cult favorite English fashion house celebrated the ribbon-cutting at its first U.S. store on Nov. 21 at Avalon in Alpharetta, about 35 miles north of Atlanta. While Boden himself could not attend the opening, His Majesty’s Consul General Rachel Galloway and representatives for the brand were on hand, along with the temporary installation of a pink and green double-decker bus. The bus left Georgia on Nov. 23, but Jessica Franklin, a senior director of brand and creative at Boden who flew from London to oversee the shop’s quintessentially British design, said there’s still much for holiday shoppers to discover about the colorful clothing brand and 1960s swinging London vibe that inspired it.
“The store has been a real labor of love for us,” she said. “There are lots of British quirks.”
Bespoke chandeliers hang from the ceiling, fitting rooms are wallpapered with iconic British celebrities and framed painted portraits of the Beatles, Twiggy, Winston Churchill, David Bowie and Shakespeare hang behind the counter. The baubles on the Christmas trees in the shop are made by another trendy English brand: Cornishware.
The company’s chief commercial officer, Katherine Dannenberg, said Boden was a mail-order business in the U.S. for 20 years before deciding on a store location and choosing metro Atlanta as “the one.”
“Everything is here: the right competitive set that we know our customers are shopping at, the management, just spectacular. And of course, we love the weather here. I think that’s perfect,” she said.
Lights in Gainesville
Another favorite holiday activity besides shopping is seeing lights, and Mildred Fockele,
director of the Atlanta Botanical Garden in Gainesville, hopes Gainesville Glows: Lanterns & Lights lures folks from North Georgia and beyond.
“What we have done is lit up the forest and it just glows with light,” she said of the Garden’s holiday display marking its 10th anniversary in Hall County.
“We have about 500 luminaries that line the pathways,” she said. “ We have an 80-foot light tunnel. We have several pine trees throughout the garden that range in height from 15 to 35 feet. We have stars up in the trees of the top of the canopy.”
Fockele said the lights do more than just sparkle.
“Part of it is, you know, we have shorter days,” she said. “We’re going into the shortest day of the year. I think we crave that extra light and certainly magical light that’s associated with holiday lights and lanterns and things that glow. I think it’s just a magical time of the year and sort of a time to reset before the new year.”
