A million lights and carriage rides anchor Boots & Bells holiday season
When the Majestic Christmas Company tested them, strings of lights hanging every foot along every facet of the three layer-cake blocks shaping the courthouse changed it to something never seen before, said Barry Hamilton, the fourth generation with a view of the north side of each of three court-house facades overlooking monitoring main street for the 107 years since the family store opened.
“People are going to come see this,” he said, approving city preparations for a re-tooled holiday season billed as Boots and Bells.
The Four Winds Carriage Company website has been plugging a $25 Mt. Pleasant ride alongside its $250 Dallas Highland Park Christmas-light tour since September. The company’s six-week holiday run here begins when Mayor Tracey Craig throws the switch on the lights at 6:30 p.m. November 12 courthouse lawn ceremony.
City Manager Ed Thatcher, Parks Director Ricky Harris and Four Winds Carriage Company’s Cat Poage pose in front of the newly-restored 19th century bank building whose ground floor is now home to the Butler’s Pantry. It’s the south end anchor of the block dominated by Glyn’s, a one-time boot and saddle shop that over more than half a century has morphed into a retail anchor in the business district.
In Highland Park, the holiday carriage rides are a tradition that “draws families from three states,” said Cat Poage, whose 16 pulling horses and ten carriages make Four Winds the biggest horse-drawn ride company in Texas. Additionally, last spring she completed her equine dentist study. She shoes horses.
Given the lousy year it’s been in the cities, she visited Mt. Pleasant while searching for Texas “Hallmark towns.
“That’s a clean, vibrant business district where the downtown shops aren’t chains,” she said. Hallmark Towns have a Christmas tradition. “This year people are more interested in a small-town Christmas than a pilgrimage into the city.”
Thinking quickly, when the first 19 evenings of November rides in Mt. Pleasant sold out, she added a second carriage. To book one of the remaining of some 500 slots during the six-week carriage-ride run ending December 27, saddle up on line at mpcity.net.
Bring your own blanket and exercise common sense pandemic protocol.
For the first time anybody remembers, a city advance team went to work to get legal permission to access roofs of everybody in the downtown district before changing out skyline lighting and bringing wiring up to code, a spinoff benefit of the Christmas deal.
City Parks teams – who also maintain the Main Street District – will be marking sidewalks for social distancing. The Majestic Christmas Company, which also fabricated the giant ornaments hanging from pecan trees turned to Christmas trees on the courthouse lawn, likewise has created a secure area for Santa Clause that doubles as a Texas Boots and Belles themed photo backdrop.
Back at Hamilton’s Jewelers, the morning after the light test, Barry Hamilton was on his building’s first-floor sidewalk awning, working on the twin spotlights that illuminate “Hamiton’s” spelled out across the third floor façade. Things break.
It’s best to begin planning Christmas early.
“Like July,” said City Manager Ed Thatcher, whose staff and volunteer Main Street Committee’s first planning meeting was called after the town council pinned hope on the Christmas season as a light at the end of a spring and summer spiked with daily Covid briefings.
Six months later, they’ve got Shreveport KTBS TV sending Rick Rowe to town for the lighting ceremony.
There’s an intended regional marketing aspect in the planning .
“Our analytics show a lot of Dallas Preston Hollow and Parks City newspaper readers are also lake home owners,” on lakes Bob Sandlin and Cypress Springs, said Suzanne Brooke, with Bayley Brooke, a community relations and media firm that works with the city.
