Southern Living?

My sister and her husband live in the Piedmont of the Blue Ridge just under the Mason-Dixon, and they have over the years transformed their red brick 1990s dwelling into something colonial and charming. Homey, not overdone, it is particularly lovely at Christmas. Very often I have told Ann that her house is worthy of a Southern Living Magazine photo layout, intending this to be high praise. Sissy, as it happens, is a long-time subscriber to Southern Living. When I visited her a couple of years ago around Thanksgiving time, while we were drinking coffee in her Florida room, its large windows framing the distant azure haze that hinted at the ancient and storied mountains farther yonder, I noticed among her magazines SL’s 2022 special Christmas edition. After reading one of its articles “All Decked Out: Gorgeous Southern Homes in Savannah, Charleston and New Orleans,” I suggested that she throw all of her SLs in the trash, Elizabeth Ann agreeing that the magazine is not what it once was.


Of dubious provenance and unschooled in American history and real Southern culture, those who produce SL are out to Northernize and to correct, to “enlighten” Southerners, whether we want to be Northernized, corrected, “enlightened” or not. (Enlightenment these days is defined by the morally, spiritually and intellectually bankrupt Yankee ideology.) Tone deaf Critical Theorists with nifty new recipes, they use the heartwarming trappings of the South to destroy the very heart and soul of the South.


That Southern Living special Christmas edition that I came across at my sister’s predictably pushed the “inclusion” envelope to the maximum with the aforementioned article’s introducing readers to Jordan and James, soi-disant natives of Charleston. The SL writer declared that a Southern Yuletide is “so much more than magnolia….” It is now a matter of the homeowners’ demonstrating a “sophisticated” palette.


The decorating style of Jordon and James is described as “masculine Southern,” meaning “formal spaces, exciting wallpapers, fun patterns, and black and lacquered elements….” My redneck kin, however, would have a different view of what a “masculine Southern” style might be---it would more than likely involve the head of a fourteen-point buck hanging above the fireplace, a full-strut bearded wild turkey on a shelf.


The Charleston “couple’s” house, the writer of this article avows, has an “English country home vibe,” and resounds with Bing Crosby tunes. It has long been a device of the enemies of the good, the true and the beautiful— as embodied in Southern culture — to couch the aberrant, the dissolute in trite language, sentimentality and pleasant images of domestic bliss.


But try as Southern Living might, Jordon and James, God love them, are not even Ward and June Cleaver, let alone Earl Hamner’s mama and daddy. And despite what SL would have us believe, a real Southern Christmas is not about fancy “new twists” on the old traditions. A Southern Christmas is, first, about faith and, second, about those old traditions just as they are, simple but sublime, as simple and sublime as an humble arrangement of pine, holly…or magnolia.