Dickens Downtown gives Northport a unique Victorian-style Christmas tradition
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When Georgine Clarke, Kentuck Art Center founder, looked over Northport's wintry night streets and envisioned women in frocked gowns and bonnets strolling arm in arm with men in top hats and overcoats, air ripe with cider and wassail, music playing, greenery, bows and other decor dangling from lampposts, she'd gone time-traveling.
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Back past street renovations and improvements along Main Avenue and Fifth Street in the late 1980s; beyond the 20th century's popularizations of Santa Claus, Rudolph and "The Nutcracker"; and on toward the Victorian era, where British and early Americans revived Christmas spirit by revisiting caroling and family feasts, adding in newer traditions — exchanging cards — and bringing back far-older ones, such as yule logs and decorated trees.
Even beyond Charles Dickens 1843 "A Christmas Carol," she could see inspirations for the novella, from Clement Clarke Moore's 1823 poem "A Visit from St. Nicholas" and Washington Irving's 1812 New York stories, including a dream sequence of St. Nick flying over treetops in a magic wagon. Many credit Irving for idealizing Christmas as a family-oriented holiday, and Moore crafted iconic visions around the jolly old elf, but "Christmas Carol" either invented or popularized the phrase "Merry Christmas," and its vivid figures — Scrooge, Tiny Tim, Bob Cratchit, the ghosts of Marley and Christmases past, present and yet to come — stuck in the public imagination.
From Kentuck at 503 Main Ave., Clarke saw sparse night traffic, even though following renovations, The Globe Restaurant, art galleries and other new businesses had joined longtime downtown Northport tenants such as City Café, Anders Hardware and Faucett’s Department Store.
Why not start a holiday-themed street party to draw the whole family?
With its street decor bridging old and new, “It seemed the time of Dickens could be moved to Northport,” Clarke said, in a 2006 interview with The Tuscaloosa News.
Thus the holiday celebration Dickens Downtown came alive, a free, family-oriented event with images, sounds, tastes and feels inspired by Victorian-era heartiness.
In the early '90s, Theatre Tuscaloosa performed abbreviated versions of "Christmas Carol" on Main; later, actors from Tuscaloosa Children's Theatre did likewise. In recent years, readings of Dickens' most famous work have been held on that first Tuesday night in December, from Shirley Place to the Kentuck Courtyard of Wonders.
One season in the early '90s, actor and restaurateur Jeff Wilson, who's played Scrooge himself, hired the writer's great-great grandson Gerald Charles Dickens to read from "Christmas Carol" at Wilson's The Globe, then on the corner of Fifth Street and Main.
It's a logistically difficult show to stage — aging and magical ghosts, flying beds, rapidly changing scenes — so other attractions were added, and became Dickens Downtown staples:
Father Christmas (Fran Viselli) walks the streets in his green, gold and earth-toned patchwork gown, leaning on a knurled staff draped in holly, and posing for pictures.
Queen Victoria (Dianne Teague or Drew Baker) might ride down a Clydesdale-pulled sleigh to hold court at Adams Antiques.
Music expanded, with more choirs, soloists, ensembles, string bands, 19th-century music groups, and some years, a 20-person bagpipe phalanx from Birmingham-based Alabama Pipe and Drums.
Carriage rides and photos; tours of historic Shirley Place; merchants offering parched peanuts, fried sausages, cider, hot chocolate and other snacks; craftspeople demonstrating old-time skills such as weaving, blacksmithing, pottery firing and broom-making; and Moore's poem, "Gift of the Magi," "How the Grinch Stole Christmas," Truman Capote's "A Christmas Memory," "Christmas Carol" and other holiday-themed writing read by members of the Rude Mechanicals.
A regular flow of "snow," from a soap-bubble machine floating airy puffs of white up and out over Main, became a favorite for photos.
Even with pinches from the 2008 recession, the spirit of generosity represented by a redeemed Scrooge rolled on.
“Given the economic conditions, it needs to be as good or better than it’s ever been,” said Carl Adams, owner of Adam’s Antiques on Main, in an interview with The Tuscaloosa News in 2009. “It’s an open house that the (Downtown Northport Merchants’ Association) puts on as outreach to the community, giving back. It’s a place you can take your whole family and not break your budget.”
Dickens Downtown broke for the pandemic in 2020, but returned in 2021, and began to see something like regular numbers — as many as 10,000, some years, according to police estimates — for 2022 and 2023.
Reach Mark Hughes Cobb at mark.cobb@tuscaloosanews.com.
This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: How Dickens Downtown became a Northport Christmas tradition
