Hub for the Holidays

Throw another log on the fire, fill your mug with hot chocolate, and settle into your favorite chair with a book full of memories of Christmas in Spartanburg.

In 1997, the Hub City Writers Project published its first collection of holiday essays to gather a chorus of voices celebrating the season in our Southern town. Sixteen years later, we asked a new generation of Spartanburg writers to share their personal stories, from the Eastside to the Westside, from Morgan Square to Pacolet, from the Lawson's Fork to the Tyger River.

What is Christmas in Spartanburg County? It's friends arriving with fried peach pies, artichoke dip, and Piedmont Club eggnog in hand. It's trudging into the woods to find the perfect cedar tree and dressing it with silver icicles. It's a sunset behind the Blue Ridge Mountains as the old mill bell rings in the yuletide. It's waiting and waiting for snow, dreaming up snowstorms while watching the sky for the silhouette of a sleigh.

Christmas here means finding unexpected gifts in places familiar and surprising: on the roof of the First Baptist Church on Main Street, in the presence of a blue-tinted aluminum tree lit by floodlights, or inside a big green "mistletoe barrel" with your first crush. Whether you are new to Spartanburg or have spent every one of your Christmases here, the thirty-three writers in this collection will remind you that there's no place like Hub City for the holidays.

Contributors: Cynthia Boiter, Bob Bourguignon, Rob Brown, Peter Bishop Caster, Linda Cobb, Julie Schweitert Collazo, Dicksie J. Cribb, Josette Williams Davison, Edwin C. Epps, Randy Ferebee, Malinda Fillingim, Christopher George, Eph Goodloe, Erin Haire, Beatrice Hill, Ashley Holt, Crystal Irby, Nannie Jeffries, Dorothy Chapman Josey, Anne Lambert, Charles Lindsay, Celina Means, Dawn Johnson Mitchell, Kam Neely, Merianna Neely, Mickey A. Pierce, Bertice Teague Robinson, Catherine Robe Schumacher, Susan A. Sistare, Daniel Cross Turner, JP Williams, Dick Willis and Susan Willis Dunlap, and Stephen Willis