Happy Southern New Year 2018!

New Year’s in the South means fun and unique — sometimes weird — happenings. Here are a few to consider:

Mount Olive Pickle's New Year's Eve Pickle Drop

Watch a pickle fall from the sky in Mt. Olive, North Carolina, at the annual Pickle Drop. At 7 p.m. Eastern Time (midnight Greenwich Mean Time), the New Year’s Eve three-foot lighted pickle comes down the flagpole into a redwood pickle tank while thousands celebrate. Naturally, there’s music, refreshments and more. 

Razorbacks and MoonPies

Other weird New Year’s Eve drops include the MoonPie falling 34 stories from the top of the RSA Bank Trust Tower in downtown Mobile for the Mobile New Year, and the Late Night Fayetteville celebration, which includes the Hog Drop in addition to live music, family fun, Sacred Somatics performers and much more. If you're wondering why a MoonPie, the southern Alabama town throws the Chattanooga-based sweet treat at Mardi Gras. As for the hog, Fayetteville is home to the University of Arkansas Razorbacks.

Rat Pack New Year’s Bash

Ring in the New Year at Messina Hof Winery in the Hill Country of Texas with the winery’s Texas Sparkling wine, music and contest for best dancer at the Rat Pack New Year's Bash. Dress in your best vintage outfit and bring your dancing shoes. General admission is $30 and you can stay at the Messina Hof's Manor Haus Bed & Breakfast. 

Jack and Music

New Year’s Eve in Music City means music at the Jack Daniel's Music City Midnight event. Look for the likes of Keith Urban, Maren Morris, Cheap Trick, Carly Pearce, Jonny P, Larkin Poe, and the Fisk Jubilee Singers in Nashville this New Year’s Eve, along with the midnight Music Note Drop and fireworks outside the State Capitol building. Need more convincing? Watch Keith Urban urge you to visit.

Courtesy of http://www.visitmusiccity.com/

Weird, Wacky and Wild South is written by travel writer Chere Coen who loves a strange and unique Southern place or tradition. 

For a child happiness once came in a small metal box — the Lunchbox Museum of Columbus, Georgia

Who can forget those metal containers we hauled off to school, each containing something scrumptious — we hoped, at least — inside? And no matter that it was our lunch we were bringing, filled with nutrients to get us through the school day, it was the outside of those boxes that mattered most.

Those metal lunchboxes are a thing of the past, surpassed by plastic, then soft, safer materials. After all, swinging a metal lunchbox at the schoolyard bully could result in a broken nose and a suspension.

Still, don’t you miss them?

You can relieve your childhood memories at the Lunchbox Museum in Columbus, Georgia, where Allen Woodall has assembled on display around 1,000 lunchboxes of all shapes and sizes and each sporting popular culture icons, among other artwork. There’s the 1935 Mickey Mouse lunchbox, Marvel superheroes, TV shows like Charlie Angels, Scooby Doo and Laugh-In and so much more! 

Nancy Giles (one of my favorite on-air reporters) recently spotlighted the museum on CBS Sunday Morning and explains how the fad began in the 1950s and continued until 1985 when Rambo sealed its fate after some Florida moms felt the metal boxes were weapons of destruction during kid fights.

Click here for the Sunday Morning video.

The Lunchbox Museum, featuring the largest collection of lunchboxes in the world, is located inside the Rivermarket Antique Mall in Columbus.

Check out more photos (courtesy of Visit Columbus) below.

Weird South is written by travel and food writer Chere Dastugue Coen who always loves a weird and unusual place. 

Visiting Angels on the Bluff in Natchez

Tickets go on sale every year on Aug. 1 for the annual Angels on the Bluff, the long-running candlelit tour of the Natchez City Cemetery. And folks in the know have this date circled on their calendar. Tickets sell out quickly and it’s easy to understand why. Local actors and musicians in period costumes channel historical figures from beyond the grave — and the town has its fair share of colorful people who have passed.  

Robert Stewart

I was honored to have been a part of this year’s celebration, held Nov. 9-11, 2017. There were 16 shuttles the evening I participated, meaning 16 busloads of ticket holders being shuttled from the Natchez Visitor’s Center to the cemetery on the north side of town. All proceeds benefit the cemetery.

We were the 6 p.m. group and we filled the school bus to capacity. Once at the cemetery, we followed our leader dressed in a jacket with reflector tape and holding a flashlight. The trails we were meant to follow were lighted by luminaries and several of the live oak trees were lighted from below, casting eerie shadows about. Some of the angels atop gravestones, including the famous “Turning Angel,” (more about her later), were also illuminated and stood out in the darkness as if serving as our protector.

Lilly Granderson

First up to tell her story was Katherine Grafton Miller, the founder of the Natchez Pilgrimage, who described how she saved the town with tourism in the 1930s. We then met cabinetmaker Robert Stewart who once also served as one of the city’s undertakers.

L.S. Cornwell, a local merchant and brief publisher of The Eagle newspaper in Concordia Parish, Louisiana, was played by an Angels veteran, a humorous actor accompanied by the dead man’s wife, who also gave a humorous tone to the storytelling.

Lilly Ann Eliza Granderson was an inspiring story, telling how she rose from house and field slave to a woman who operated a secret school where she taught other slaves to read and write.

Many people know of Florence Irene Ford because of her unusual grave. Florence’s mother comforted her in life when thunderstorms hit — she was deathly afraid of them — so when she died at the young age of 10, her mother built a stairway into the ground and a window next to her coffin so that she may visit Florence and comfort her when storms arrived.

The Turning Angel

Back to the Turning Angel. One of the night’s storyteller was John Carkeet, a plasterer and undertaker who was the 11th victim of the 1908 Natchez Drug Company Explosion. The downtown building exploded and burned due to a gas leak and five young women were among the casualties. Their bodies are buried beneath the Turning Angel and the angel watches over them. It’s said that when you walk near the statue, the angel’s eyes will turn and follow you.

Greg Iles, a New York Times bestselling author who lives in Natchez, once used her image on the cover of one of his books, appropriately titled "Turning Angels."

Other fun aspects of the night included a fiddler at a Civil War soldier gravesite, reliving the dancing life of Lillie Vidal Davis Boatner and a dance around a campfire by gypsies.

Sound interesting? Mark your calendar for Aug. 1 and nab those tickets fast. For more information on this historic and beautiful cemetery, visit https://www.natchez.ms.us/150/Cemetery.

Dead artists at Mobile Museum of Art

Halloween is the time of year when the veil between the dead and the living grows thin. Which means in Mobile, the ghosts of famous artists come back to life.

The Mobile Museum of Art will host a Day of the Dead-meets-Night at the Museum Halloween extravaganza beginning at 6 p.m. tonight. The museum has partnered with AIDS Alabama South to bring about this family affair and will include performances from a number of community theaters as deceased artists come to haunt the galleries. There will be a gallery scavenger hunt, live music from Melissa Robertson, Day of the Dead altars made for artists no longer with us, sugar skull making, face painting and Tarot card readings.

Costumes are recommended. $5 donation requested.

Chere Coen is a travel and food writer who loves weird Southern stories, not to mention a ghost or two.