Comment on this story Historic Old North KnoxvilleVictorian Holiday Home Tour Saturday Dec. 4: 4-9 p.m. Sunday Dec. 5: 1-5 p.m. Tickets: $10 Starts at St. Mary’s Hospital

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas

by Matt Edens

Ah, the holidays: the neighbors are busily trying to outdo one another with thousands of lights, a dozen catalogs arrive in the mail each day and all those mall parking spaces that never get used are suddenly full. It’s enough to make one wish for the simpler Yuletides of yesteryear—an old-fashioned Victorian Christmas.

Humbug, I say. The tradition of what Christmas was, quite simply, never was. Metro Pulse’s own Jack Neely has proven time and again in print that a real “Victorian Christmas” in Knoxville was a riotous affair punctuated by pranks and firecrackers. And even the tale most responsible for the traditional “Victorian Christmas,” Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, glosses over the more, uh, Dickensian elements of the era. To quote James Lileks, Internet scribe and Mencken of Minneapolis: “as much as I love the Gospel of St. Scrooge and its filmic manifestations, I can’t quite buy the little houses and lamps and shops and Merrie Olde England stuff without thinking of Whitechapel, the horrid sanitary and social conditions, the tanneries spilling offal and toxins into the gutters, urchins threading their way through gin shops to find the syphilitic heap they call mother, etc.”

Okay, so a real maybe a real Victorian Christmas wasn’t quite as Currier and Ives as it’s cracked up to be. But that doesn’t detract from all the trappings we traditionally associate with it—eggnog and evergreens, carolers and chestnuts roasting. In light of that, might I suggest an alternative “Victorian Christmas” tradition, one dating back to the eighties—the 1980’s, that is: Historic Old North Knoxville’s 16th Annual Victorian Holiday Home Tour.

With a total of 10 homes, plus music from the Fulton High School choir at the Fourth Presbyterian Church (accompanied by its newly restored pipe organ) this year’s tour takes you through the best bits of yesteryear without all the offal and urchins, much as the homes themselves combine antique architecture with modern convenience. Which, as you’ll see, takes some effort. The 10 homes on tour range from being meticulously restored to deep in the midst of restoration, so, in addition to holiday dÉcor, the tour offers a great behind-the-scenes glimpse of what it takes to transform one of these homes from dilapidated to dazzling. It’s also a great sampler of what the neighborhood has to offer: everything from massive mansions to quaint cottages and bungalows. And definitely don’t miss the last house on the tour over on Leonard Place—once gutted by fire, the owner literally took it down to the foundation and rebuilt it from the ground up—a vintage Victorian home that’s essentially brand new.

So why not embrace a tradition that seamlessly combines old and new (speaking of which, there’s both free parking and door-to-door trolley service)? Best of all, with proceeds going to Meals-on-Wheels, Knox Heritage, the Fulton Alumni Scholarship Association and the Christenberry PTA, you don’t have to be a Scrooge, either.

December 2, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 49 © 2004 Metro Pulse