CHRISTMAS AT GAINESRIDGE

Yesterday, I had two meals at the Gaines Ridge Supper Club in Camden. It was a good day. This is one of the spots we always direct tourists to when they are in the area. It is on the Alabama Department of Tourism’s 100 Places to Eat Before You Die list. We recommend the food, but love the atmosphere as well. It is especially beautiful in December. The setting is beautiful any time. It is located just east of Camden in an antebellum home set on a hill surrounded by trees draped in Spanish moss. In December, the house is festooned with all the accoutrements of the season. It greets you with lanterns along the gravel driveway. At night they are lit. The front of the house is garlanded with evergreens and red bows that are only a clue to what you’ll fine inside. Every room is decorated in a style befitting a grand old lady of a house.
This is not a fancy house, which is part of its charm. It was not built for a wealthy planter to show off his fortune. It was a lived in house of a normal family. It has been added on to as the restaurant business grew. The added on part is the one most folks mistake for the original part because it has the look of a pioneer cabin.
When the two Gaines sisters started the supper club, nobody in Camden thought it would last. People there didn’t eat out much. There had been only one café in town as long as anybody could remember before Gaines Ridge. Betty Gaines Kennedy and her sister prove the local critics wrong. For many years they have been serving good food to appreciative people. It is another example of how far out of their way people will come to eat well. The group I was with a lunch yesterday was from Montgomery, 60 miles away.
They were expecting to eat lunch, not spending so much time with the visual treats as well. Every visitor is free to look over the whole restaurant before settling down to their meal. It is all right to pop into the other dining rooms to see the decorations even if your party is not in that room. It’s a kind of “excuse me, I’m just looking” as we sometimes do in department stores. The other diners are good natured about it because they just did the same thing.
The rooms are all done in individual themes, but they flow easily into one another.
The homespun atmosphere of the fireplace room was my favorite. Most of the other rooms were fancier, but the decorations on the hearth were charming. There was a teddy bear and other toys in a wicker box placed next to the tree that was decorated in bird ornaments, natural materials and raffia. The mantle had simple decorations. A fire burned merrily in the fireplace. The tables were covered in red and white checked homespun. The valances at the window continued the checked theme with ribbon and greenery trim.
All of the rooms had trees. Some were grand ladies in their Christmas finery. My favorite tree was a small one that had demitasse teacup as the only ornaments. The owner has many interesting collections. I think the cups must come from those. Just inside the front door, there are bookcases filled with, of all things, a collection of gravy boats! I wouldn’t have thought of collecting those. However, some of them were pressed into service in the dining rooms as holders for sugar packets. It was clever idea, because with all the tea and coffee that gets served, I imagine there is a call for a lot of sweetener packets.
Even the back porch has red and green plaid cloths. There are red ribbons on the plants in the back garden. If you want to get the Christmas spirit, got the Gaines Ridge.
They are open all year around Wednesday-Saturday nights, and for lunch for groups by appointment. They are open daily for lunch during December and at nights for group Christmas parties. At lunch the menu will be whatever they happen to be serving. Yesterday, it was a traditional turkey and dressing dinner. It included turkey/dressing, rice and gravy, sweet potato casserole with crushed pineapple and a touch of cloves, well seasoned green beans and always hot from the oven homemade parker house rolls. There was bread pudding with bourbon sauce. There is always all the tea and coffee you can drink. When you arrive, hot spiced cider will be waiting for you to enjoy as you walk through looking at the decorations. The total for lunch including tax and tip is $15.00.
For dinner, the menu will include several choices of entrée. With this comes your choice of potato or rice pilaf, a dinner salad and, of course, those homemade rolls. For we dessert, we were fortunate enough to be served the black bottom pie, the dish that is to die for.
Gaines Ridge is worth driving for as many visitors have discovered. It is a destination in itself, but combined with a trip to Gees Bend on the ferry and Black Belt Treasures, a gallery for local artists; it makes a great day trip. A drive around town to see the antebellum homes will add to the experience.
If you don’t have the Christmas spirit now, maybe you need a trip to Gaines Ridge to put you on the right path.

Christmas Parades

We in the South all have an innate love of pageantry, whether we admit it our not. That is why every little town has its own Christmas Parade and they are such a success. People, who would walk across the street to avoid each other on a normal day, will shout “hello” and wave until they nearly fall off the float speaking to the same people as they parade through town. They will throw candy to people they normally wouldn’t give a crumb of bread to if they were starving.
People lined up along the parade route who are normally staid and calm will scream for candy. They will jostle little children out of the way for Mardi Gras beads to turn their conservative outfits into Christmas decorations.
Christmas parades are the great equalizer. Anybody who is willing to march can get in. In our local parade that holds true unless you are a horse. They were outlawed along time ago when the Sheriff’s Posse was mounted in the parade. The horses left too many calling cards along the way. The mothers of the majorettes complained about the condition of their daughters’ boots. Horses were outlawed immediately. The Sheriff’s Posse wasn’t about to loose their dignity by being followed by pooper scoopers.
Out floats are all homemade. Some are quite charming. They are always judged by secret judges scattered in the crowd. Their identity is always secret for their own protection. It is necessary, as anyone who has ever judged a beauty pageant or floats that parents worked late into the night to build will tell you.
It was a shock to me to learn that now we have to pay bands to be in parades. I thought they were in it for the sheer honor of performing. I guess all that changed when every town’s parade started being on the same day. Now they hire out to the highest bidder. Consequently, there are few bands per parade. There were actually some floats this year with love performers on board or boom boxes. They can’t hold a candle to a drum beat and horns, but at least modern technology has made available alternatives to the bidding on bands.
The one float that I thought went too far even in the Bible Belt was the SUV with Christian Queen written on the side and the Queen ensconced on the back tailgate. We are all far too fond of our various and sundry brands of religion to be able to agree on one brand as being able to proclaim one of theirs queen. It is quite arrogant to assume that one outshines the others and just seized the title for itself. I’ll be interested to see how many brands of Christian Queens are floated out next year.
People stand on the side of the road where their child will be facing from the float they are on. One mother who was riding in the parade (not the Christian Queen) has bought specials toys to throw to her child and friends. I hope her aim was good or she’d have more problems than even the Christian Queen with the partiality issue.
It was a long assed parade. We are very proud of our fire departments locally. They win all kinds of state competitions. We have bought them many fire trucks. All of them were in the parade. I was glad to see children back riding them. For a while, the firemen were too arrogant to allow it. They had two excuses. One after the other – the first was that if the fire truck had to pull out and go fight a fire, what would happen to the children? That was settled by parents having to walk along and monitor the floats. Then they said their insurance wouldn’t allow it. We locals thought that strange since they were climbing all over fire trucks in nearby towns. I just don’t think they wanted to be worried with children until a few of them got pretty grandchildren they wanted to show off and all that changed.
Our local parade has had the same godfather for 22 years. It’s a lot of work to put on one of these. He was an unsung hero until this year when somebody had sense enough to make him the Grand Marshall. They didn’t have a Citizen of the Year. It seems that anybody chosen citizen of the year either dies or has a serious illness shortly thereafter. We wanted to keep the parade guru in good health because it is a thankless job.
Having small town Christmas Parade really is a great way to start the season. It is all about peace and good will even if it is for just

Decking the Halls

My friend Judy Martin’s house in on the Tour of Homes in Marion this weekend.
I am on standby with some fake amaryllises in case the real ones don’t force in time. We are down to the wire. The florist is applying heat and light to make it happen.
Judy is one of those superwomen that have 20 things going at once. Any physical problems she might have are never mentioned. She just gives it her all and goes full speed ahead. Last year this time, she had major surgery with complications, was renovating her early 1800s house and still selling another house two counties away. This year, I guess she got bored with ordinary life (which for her is juggling four balls of activity on the air) and decided to add a little excitement by agreeing to host the tour.
Judy has her degree in interior design which has little to with her career life which includes working with two major universities, a non-profit foundation, and numerous volunteer jobs which she does so easily, that most people don’t realize the effort she puts in. Of course, the truth is that making a hard job look easy is a talent in itself. That is the same principal she is applying to the tour of homes. I’ve known women who can make a year long major production out of planning a wedding. It would take Judy one week and it would be a quality production.
She has chosen to make her décor theme how the house might have looked in its early days. She is using all natural greenery and fruits with a few feathers of local birds thrown in. Of course, like the early settlers, she will have some of the family pieces of silver and other collected treasures on display in her tablescapes.
Judy and her husband, John, did most of the renovation themselves with local subcontractors and carpenters. The house is not one of those grand Tara/Twelve Oaks jobs. It is one of the three oldest houses in an old Black Belt town. It has upper and lower porches and two front doors. The chicken coop in the backyard is on the National Register of Historic Places. Their renovation was kind to the old house. It was actually three houses cobbled together to make what is now their home. The den, the heart of the house was a sagging enclosed back porch. They jacked it up and made it look the way it was supposed to. They took two of the multitude of bedrooms and made great big baths that have places to lounge in them. The kitchen is state of the art with the prettiest yellow distressed cabinets you ever saw. The colors in the house are soft sagey greens and neutrals. The colors of the furnishings and draperies are muted, but not dull. You can imagine how the natural decorations will enhance the holiday theme.
Judy will probably kill me for divulging plan B which is having the fake flowers that will only be pressed into service if the real ones don’t rear their natural heads. I promise that these are good fakes. They came from the NDI (Natural Designs Incorporated) in Brewton which advertises in Southern Accents and Architectural Digest magazines which don’t allow any tacky in their pages. Besides, they’ll be interspersed with genuine raised in the woods greenery and berries from the back yard. If you don’t tell, I won’t.