Holly — Come Christmastime, the little town of Holly tells a tale of two cities. It’s a historic village home to some 6,000 people and a portal to an old-timey Yuletide that tens of thousands of visitors enjoy every December.
The city has hosted the annual Holly Dickens Festival for 52 years. It’s a masterclass in Christmas cheer, an event to ward off the Ebenezer Scrooges of the world.
When I took my kids to the festival, nature was helping sell the charm. Puffy snowflakes were falling thick, coating the streets in a blanket of Christmas mirth. Even without the snow, though, it’s hard to feel anything less than jubilant walking around Holly’s downtown, decked out for the holidays.
There are Christmas trees galore, decorated simply but beautifully. No tinsel or rainbow lights here. The greenery was instead wrapped in big red bows, and warm yellow bulbs lit our way through the red brick streets. It’s so pretty, filmmakers have taken note. Downtown Holly has provided the backdrop for two recent Hallmark-esque movies.
As we made our way down Battle Alley—once the sight of many prohibition-era drunken brawls—we witnessed the commercial genius behind a good Christmas festival: Everyone there, myself included, was in the mood to shop.
Vendors and local stores gave us a chance to revel in mercantile glory. At the festival, you can caress the hand-knit scarves, sniff the home-rendered tallow face cream, watch someone engrave a cedar cutting board with your grandma’s famous sugar-cookie recipe.
Christmas shopping at a festival like this one isn’t scrolling on the Target app. It’s a smile, a conversation, a personal exchange.
Ducking in and out of booths and storefronts, we stopped to warm up by the bonfires that dotted the streets. Carolers dressed in Victorian garb swept past us, hoop skirts swirling in the freshly fallen snow.
We sipped hot chocolate and shivered shoulder to shoulder with other festival-goers as one street performer swallowed a collection of swords and another danced with flaming batons.
A Christmas festival like this one is, of course, a little kitschy. It requires a little grace for the gal pretending to be Queen Victoria, begging you to join her court. And it’s the kind of place where you’ve got to decide whether you’ll splurge on a $60 horse-drawn carriage ride.
But it’s also good old-fashioned holiday fun, out in the real world with others this Christmas season. And who can be a Scrooge about that?
Katie Clarey is a contributing writer for Michigan Enjoyer.
