The 58-year-old holiday tour featured at Historic Columbia houses is back. 

The long-standing tradition features a tour of the Robert Mills and Hampton-Preston mansions with decorations from the 1820s-1850s. 

The tours go into a deep dive of the 200-year-old houses’ history during the holidays, said Historic Columbia’s visitor experience manager, Heather Bacon-Rodgers. 

“We’ve been doing these holiday tours, and they change and morph and we talk about different things,” Bacon-Rodgers said. “… We talk about the holiday experience for everyone who would have been on these sites. That’s both the white enslaving families and those that they enslaved.”

She said they go into the hard history of the holidays and not just the pretty picture of Christmas that everyone thinks about. 

The way the houses are decorated are period appropriate to the way that they would have been in the 1800s, Historic Columbia’s group tour coordinator said. 

“The symbolism, the (imagery) of this period, how it came to be, that’s the history we try to tell,” Adam Miller said. “We also try to include local people, local artifacts, and of course, these are decorated thoroughly by our collections team here.”

Li Hubbard, Historic Columbia’s weekend staff coordinator, said the holiday tours makes this one of his favorite times of the year.

“I just really love being able to, like, educate people on our own history,” Hubbard said. “These homes are amazing kinds of tools to be able to think about this time period and its implications still today.”

Even though the tours are a yearly thing, Bacon-Rodgers said you never know what you might get.

“Our guides are really wonderful,” Bacon-Rodgers said. “They’re really excited about it, too. It changes a little bit every year, so even if you came last year, coming this year, you’re going to see something different or hear something different, have a different experience.”

Not only are early Christmas traditions talked about, but so are other holidays such as Hanukkah and Yom Kapur, Miller said. 

Hubbard said he thinks the reason people love them so much is a mixture of things.

“All of the houses are beautiful,” Hubbard said. “We decorate them for the holidays for these tours as well. … I also think there’s a lot of educational value about what we share through these houses as well, and I think people are able to draw a lot of meaning from that.”

A lot of people celebrate their holiday traditions by bringing their kids every year from when they were little to college-age, Bacon-Rodgers said.

“It’s a really cool thing to sort of get into that Christmas spirit, right?” Bacon-Rodgers said. “ … So, starting these tours two weeks before Thanksgiving is kind of perfect. … So, it’s just great. These are a lot of fun.”