Grayson: Tonight on a special Holiday edition of Mississippi Roads.

In Madison, you're guaranteed to see ice no matter how warm or cold this winter might be.

Some old decorations in Natchez are being brought back to life in time for the holidays.

And believe it or not, there are a few villages in Mississippi where the holidays are always in season.

And a historic home on the Coast gets ready for the holidays in its own way.

Support for the Arts segment   of Mississippi Roads   comes   from   the   Mississippi   Arts Commission   whose mission is   to be a catalyst   for the Arts and creativity   in Mississippi.

Information available   at www.arts.ms.gov.

Mississippi Roads is made   possible in part by   the generous support of   viewers like you.

Thank you!

♪ Down Mississippi roads... ♪ ♪ Mississippi Roads.

♪ Hi, welcome back to Mississippi Roads.

I'm your host, Walt Grayson.

Irving Berlin wrote it.

Bing Crosby sang it.

I love it.

You love it.

We've all sung it.

"I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas."

Of course you know and I know that dreaming of a white Christmas is about as close as we get, most years here in Mississippi.

We can sing about roasting chestnuts over an open fire or ice and snow and things like that, but the reality of it is a snow that sticks to anything in Mississippi, especially around Christmas time, is a rare treat indeed.

So a year ago, when Baptist Health Systems in Madison had the idea to build a 7,200 square-foot ice rink in the middle of the state, it was no small undertaking.

But build it they did, and the crowds followed.

And it was so successful that this year, they doubled the size of the rink to more than 14,000 square feet.

And the organizers brought back another favorite feature this year: The Christmas Story Trail.

This is a great place for folks to take a break for a while or for people who came to maybe hear the singing and not necessarily to skate can walk along the quarter-mile trail and enjoy the decorations.

And while we're enjoying these decorations, let's get down to Natchez and meet a man who has been repairing decorations that have been cherished by that city for a long, long time.

♪♪ A little Christmas magic is returning to the bluffs of Natchez; thanks in part to Mike Lomasney.

His donated time and effort is breathing new life into these handmade animated Christmas displays.

Lomasney: So probably seven or eight years these things were shoved in various places in storage and virtually abandoned.

Many of them, unfortunately, were lost.

Over 40 years ago, a gentleman by the name of Linus Hammak who worked for International Paper Company, a phenomenal artist, started putting these things together.

So over the course of 20 years, he would work on these decorations, paint them, cut them out and actually build them.

Many of them were animated.

His imagination was unbelievable.

My challenge has been to keep his patterns, keep his style and repair and redo with all now marine plywood, high grade and yet keeping it totally in keeping with what he put together.

Grayson: The displays go up the day after Thanksgiving, but are operated on a limited basis due to their delicate condition.

We've got to remember that these things were hand-made some 40 years ago and are fairly gentle.

So we don't want to just run them constantly.

So we run from 5:30 till 9:00.

This was not part of Mr. Hammak's.

This is my wife's idea.

She found a small pattern for these snowmen as them standing together and it wasn't animated.

It was just a picture of the two snowmen and it was actually a very small pattern.

We blew it up and I worked on fixing the animation so that it would sit there and wave.

My wife and my son did all of the painting that you see here.

So I did the animation.

They did the painting.

So it's a family affair.

Grayson: Much like Santa, Mike works year round in his workshop to get the displays ready for Christmas.

Lomasney: I think you'd be looking at six weeks work to put one together.

There's quite a bit in them to do the entire thing along with all of the electrical and all of the controls and all of the interlocks and what have you.

If you'll look at how very patient he was cutting out all of the trees, the little horse, the little man, he's even got his whip in his hand and all of this is cut out by hand and painted.

The little church steeple lights.

His timing on the lights.

He goes from daylight to dark.

The lights around the perimeter.

The Season's Greetings.

They all swap back and forth on a timed mechanism that he has hand-built with wooden cams on a small gear motor.

Remarkable.

Today, you'd just pick up a computer chip and a computer controller, set it and be done with it.

Every bit of this is manual.

Grayson: And Mike's manual labor brings back special memories for the people of Natchez that they can now share with the younger generation.

("We Wish You a Merry Christmas" playing) Woman: I have two older sisters and a brother and we would load up in the car and fight for who was going to be in the front seat, who was going to be next to the windows because we all were going to go down to International Paper Company where all these wonderful displays were out.

We would load up family friends and go down there and take our time to look at Christmas lights down there and go through neighborhoods also.

Thank goodness, in the last five years, it's really made a comeback.

And it's very special to have my nieces and nephews come home and see what we got to do as a child.

♪♪ Lomasney: It's exciting to do good will and to see folks really enjoy it.

The gratification you get out of it, you can't be paid for that.

♪♪ (Choir singing "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen") Right now, I'm standing in front of the stage at Christmas on Ice.

This stage will host a wide variety of concerts and choirs all through the Holiday Season.

Every night that Christmas on Ice is opened, which is seven days a week all the way from the middle of November through the first of January.

It's a lot of great music.

And we were fortunate enough to hear the Morrison Height's choir.

♪♪ ♪ Glory to God in the highest.

♪ ♪ Peace on the earth.

♪ ♪ Peace on the earth.

♪ ♪ Glory to God in the highest.

♪ ♪ Peace on the earth.

♪ ♪ Goodwill to men.

♪ ♪♪ ♪ People walking in the dark ♪ ♪ Finally see the light.

♪ ♪ Angels sing about his joy.

♪ ♪ Piercing through the night.

♪ ♪ Glory to God in the highest.

♪ ♪ Peace on the earth.

♪ ♪ Peace on the earth.

♪ ♪ Glory to God in the highest.

♪ ♪ Peace on the earth.

♪ ♪ Goodwill to men.

♪ ♪♪ ♪ Wise men travel from afar.

♪ ♪ Gifts to him they bring.

♪ ♪ Now behold the Son of God.

♪ ♪ Christ, the newborn King.

♪ ♪ Glory to God in the highest.

♪ ♪ Peace on the earth.

♪ ♪ Peace on the earth.

♪ ♪ Glory to God in the highest.

♪ ♪ Peace on the earth.

♪ ♪ Goodwill to men.

♪ ♪♪ ♪ Glory to God in the highest.

♪ ♪ Glory to God in the highest.

♪ ♪ Glory to God in the highest.

♪ ♪ Glory to God in the highest.

♪ ♪ Glory to God in the highest.

♪ ♪ Glory to God in the highest.

♪ ♪ Glory to God in the highest.

♪ ♪ Glory to God in the highest.

♪ ♪ Glory to God in the highest.

♪ (sung as a round throughout the choir) ♪♪ ♪ Glory to God in the highest.

♪ ♪ Peace on the earth.

♪ ♪ Peace on the earth.

♪ ♪ Glory to God in the highest.

♪ ♪ Peace on the earth.

♪ ♪ Goodwill to men... ♪ ♪♪ ♪ Peace on the earth.

♪ ♪ Goodwill, goodwill to men... ♪ At Christmas on Ice, it's not just the ice-skating that wows them.

The centerpiece of the decorations is this 40 foot tall Christmas tree that gives its light to not only the skaters, but spectators alike.

And this tree boasts something that not many others have: the ability to wow onlookers with 60 million colors that twinkle and dance in an amazing array of patterns.

Now while this tree is super-sized, we found a group of folks who take a lot of pleasure in shrinking their Christmas decorations considerably smaller.

So small, in fact, they can keep a watchful eye over snowy villages without ever leaving the room.

♪♪ I would think that the celebration of Christmas, more than any other holiday, is dependent greatly on the imagination.

And that imagination isn't confined just to wee one's dreams of sugarplum fairies or any of the other trappings of the season that become all the more real later to us, after we've wandered away from Toyland, then try to turn and find our way back home again.

The company, Department 56 has made a living for years being a very real supplier of the imagination side of Christmas.

They make the model buildings and towns and homes that go into the Snow Village and the North Pole Village and Christmas in the City and Williamsburg and others that grown ups who've found growing up to be a thankless task, can buy and set up so they can set aside a slice of their imaginations and create a nearby place where they never have to leave the settings of a scenic Christmas and they can go back there any time they want to.

Bill Addie who lives in Gallman in Copiah County has an extensive collection of many of the village themes, to which he adds about 30 new buildings a year.

Bill takes his liking for his Christmas collection, which stays up all the year, by the way.

Most people who have extensive collections of this type leave them up all year.

Not only because they are too big to take up and put away after every Christmas, but because in doing so, they attain the goal of putting them up in the first place, to create a setting where the mood or the feeling that Christmas brings can manifest itself year-round.

Bill Addie has it.

I never lost it.

I feel like a child all the time.

Grayson: Whereas Bill has collected somewhere around 450 of all types of creations of the Christmas Villages, Sara and Rhea Reilly of Jackson have specialized in just one, settling in that their favorite era in which to reproduce their favorite time of year is that represented by the times and ages of Charles Dickens in his city of London.

And much of what Dickens wrote about in his many stories is reproduced in the Dickens Village.

Plus a lot that was just incidental to the city in his age.

But of course, what makes Dickens era the perfect Christmas collection is what has to be his most famous story, A Christmas Carol.

In which stingy Ebenezer Scrooge discovers the spirit of generosity, which is one of the cardinal Spirits of Christmas.

Rhea and Sara use the setup in an upstairs room in their house to escape the bonds of space and time and reality by coming into the room and lowering the overhead lights and turning on the village and going back and away for a short vacation.

And although the Dickens Village could take you to MANY stories, Sara is attracted to one in particular in her daydreams.

Where I really get lost though, in my thoughts are with The Christmas Carol.

That's just such a unique story and been with us so many years and you go to the New Stage and you see The Christmas Carol there and you see it on television.

I get caught up in it as A Christmas Carol.

I also love chocolate and I have a chocolate factory and I have a wagon horse-drawn carriage where chocolate is sold to the vendors.

>> Grayson: Husband Rhea likes to sit in the dim light and the quiet, too.

The streets outside their Jackson home become very distant as he listens.

I come up here and I can just sit here and listen to the different- the windmill turn and the waterfall operate.

It's not real water but it looks like it from a distance.

Or the dancers are dancing in Fezziwig's warehouse.

And having the trains going.

It's just relaxing.

>> Grayson: The elaborate layout Rhea and Sara have created for their village leaves little to the imagination they've been so intricate with it.

Small little people doing small little things in small little neighborhoods and on small streets.

All happy and bringing you right along with them.

(characters singing   "Here We Come a Wassailing") This layout took quite a while to design and build and re-design and rebuild as the collection grew and grew.

And something very real came from all of this for Sara and Rhea.

>> Sara Reilly: The nicest thing about collecting is this is something we can as a couple do.

Couples need things that they are both interested in and it has really inspired us and given us reasons to do things.

Go to another town and look in their gift shops to see if we could find our piece.

Or just doing things together and learning how to work on things.

Those are the things that really mean a lot.

I just encourage couples to find their niche and find something of equal interest.

>> Grayson: The part of Christmas that sparks our imaginations is one of the most real parts of the season.

It prompts us to put trees in our living rooms and make them into something way more than just trees.

And to hang stockings by the chimney with care in hopes that St. Nicholas soon will be there.

And takes us to Merry Old England anytime we want to climb the stairs.

And makes us feel like kids again when all logic tells us that we are grown up, and the gift of imagination at Christmas allows those of us who have left it long ago, the chance to go back into Toyland again... even if only for one night a year.

And when the skaters work up a hunger out there on the ice, there's always a food court right next to the rink.

And the Pepsi Pavilion is nearby, too.

This is a place big enough for you to enjoy your Christmas party or birthday parties or some kind of holiday party with your family or your friends right here next to the rink.

And speaking of enjoying, let's enjoy another song from the Morrison Heights Choir.

♪♪ ♪ Heavenly Peace... ♪ ♪ Heavenly Peace... ♪ ♪ Heavenly Peace... ♪ ♪ Heavenly Peace... ♪ ♪ Heavenly Peace... ♪ ♪♪ One of the big attractions at Christmas on Ice is the ice slide, or more technically the ice slides because there are two of them this year.

They were so popular last year, they doubled the size.

This is where children and adults line up for the opportunity to climb on an inner tube and skate down a sled of ice that's 15 feet up in the air.

Who says Northerners have all the fun?

Ice doesn't come to us?

We just make it happen.

For real?

All right, let's go.

Yeeahhhhh!

See ya.

Whoa!

Holy Smoke!

Oh yeah, let's do this a bunch... And the state has been celebrating the holidays in style for years.

We might not have always had the technology to keep an ice rink and slides around, but we've still worked hard to make this time of year a special one.

We were on the Coast celebrating with Beauvoir, a house built in 1853 that was later called home by Jefferson Davis and his family.

Just off Hwy.

90 in Biloxi stands the former home of Jefferson Davis.

Davis was the President of the Conferdracy that ended in 1865.

In 1877 Davis wanted a quiet retreat to continue writing his books.

He found it here, now nestled among many live oaks, a place called Beauvoir.

In French, "beau voir" means beautiful view.

And even though the modern times have brought the sounds of traffic, the view still lives up to its name.

For the second year this year, Beauvoir has a new tradition ... As day transitions to night, the live oaks come alive with a more modern form of cristmas decoration.

Reindeer and even falling stars find homes among the live oaks as part of the second annual Christmas at Beauvoir.

The views outside are complimented by a glimpse at what decorations would have looked like inside the Jefferson Davis home in the late 1800's.

Including actors to guide you on the late 1800's Christmas.

We didn't have lights because we didn't have tv's or electricity, so we didn't have electric lights.

The house was built in 1848.

We're not the original owners, but I came here in 1877 at the invitation of the owner, Mrs. Dorsey.

And then in 1879 we bought it.

So 10 or 12 years we spent here.

This was our retirement home.

Our grandchildren loved to come visit Beauvoir.

The natural habitat of the community was employed in our decorating scheme.

The house smelled wonderful.

Fresh greenery.

(toy train whistle) Grayson: For those interested in a more modern era, a model railroad running through a Christmas-themed town can be found on the west side of the property at the Hayes Pavilion.

Don't forget to visit the Presidential Library while there.

Inside you will find a gift store as well as a Christmas themed movie in the Beauvior Room, as well as my personal favorite, popcorn.

(singing "joy to the world") Outside you can also relax and enjoy entertainment by various choirs and other performances on statge.

♪♪ Of course Christmas at Beauvoir wouldn't be complete without St. Nick.

Ho, ho, ho!

What do y'all want for Christmas?

Parent: We don't know.

Little boy: I want a fire engine.

A fire engine?

Oh, you can be a fireman.

Grayson: so as the sun sets in Biloxi, take a little time to enjoy the sights and sounds of Christmas from the past and present at Beauvoir.

(Choir singing "Hark the Herald Angels Sing.")

And regrettably, that's all the time we have for tonight's show.

If you would like any information you've seen in the episode, contact us at: Or like our Facebook Page.

From the MPB family to your family, we wish you the absolute very best holiday ever!

Until next time, I'm Walt Grayson.

I'll be seeing you on Mississippi Roads.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪   Mississippi   Roads   is   made   possible   in   part   by   the   generous   support   of   viewers   like   you.

Thank you!