Car Show Jingles Till for Piedmont Village Christmas Lights
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
On a recent spring Saturday in Piedmont, the old village has taken to putting on a car show for the sake of its winter illuminations, with the business of Christmas discussed with that practical cheer found in towns that have learned to make a civic virtue out of ingenuity. Marsha Rogers, the president of the Piedmont Village Christmas Lights, described an organization that began modestly enough four years ago, with a target of selling 20 new Christmas lights and instead finding, within three months, that it had sold 53 lights and enough extra for a lot of decking the halls.
It is a campaign that is a steady hallmark of everything merry and bright. The group added another tree, more lights, and, with a certain jolly confidence, the now-familiar “Merry Christmas, y’all” sign along the river.
“That was my idea,” Rogers said, with a grin. The work extended beyond ornament: for three years the group labored to clear the Anderson County bank near the bridge, cutting down 43 trees so the roadway would open onto a better view of the decorated span and the water beyond.
There was also the matter of reviving the mural, which had stood in need of attention after roughly 30 years. Trees were removed on the Greenville County side as well, so the mural would show better from the Saluda River Grill, and Larry Clark, the former art teacher, was enlisted to refurbish it. In Piedmont, even beautification appears to require forestry, patience, and a man with a brush.
The spring car show, now in its third year, is an early holiday mission and one of its larger economic engines. Rogers said the event helps support the Christmas displays while also sharing proceeds with the Wren Fire Department, whose volunteers handled the food and received the donations, and with Rose Hill Cemetery in Piedmont, which gets 30 percent of the gate.
“We just love doing it,” Rogers said, and the phrase had the sturdy sound of a volunteer organization that has discovered the usefulness of repetition.
The arrangement, in other words, is civic to its bones: the car show sustains the holiday lights, the lights draw the village together, and the village, having been warmed by one project, seems to have started several others. That, at least, is how Rogers described it. “It was sort of like a catalyst,” she said, noting the new park opening on the Anderson County side of the river in June.
Anderson County Councilman Jimmy Davis, who served as DJ for the Car Show, said the lights have become part of the fabric of the community. “It’s one of those things that makes Piedmont feel like Piedmont,” said Davis.
What began as a Christmas-light project has become, in effect, a manner of local development. Rogers spoke with evident pride about the widening circle of improvements, from river cleanup to mural work to the growing list of things now happening in Piedmont. The effect was not grand in the metropolitan sense, but it was unmistakably real: a village learning, project by project, how to make itself visible.
And that may be the most Piedmont thing of all. A place that once needed trees cut away in order to be seen now has a bridge, a mural, a sign, a car show, and expanding Christmas decorations to persuade the world to look a little longer in Piedmont.
