Five Spring Traditions in Holland Harbor

Holland Harbor sits about forty five minutes down the coast from Charleston, and for most of the year it is a town of around twenty thousand people who all know each other's business. Then summer arrives and the population triples, the parking gets impossible, and every restaurant in town starts turning tables until nine at night.

But spring is the good part. Spring is ours.

That short stretch between the last cold snap and the first tour bus is when Holland Harbor feels most like itself, and it is the season I set the new book in. Here are five things the town does every year that no one should skip.

1. The Saturday the market moves outside

From November through February, the farmers' market lives indoors in the old hall, which is warm and crowded and smells like coffee and wet wool. It works. Nobody complains. But every vendor in that building spends the whole winter counting down to the Saturday the market moves back out to the lot.

There is no announcement. Somebody just decides the weather has held long enough, and the word goes around, and then one Saturday morning you show up and there are tents going up in rows and everybody is standing around in the cold squinting at the sun like they have not seen it before.

In the book, this is the day everything changes for Carson and Haley. It is also, for a lot of these vendors, the actual start of their year.

2. Porch season

There is one evening in early spring, usually the first week the temperature stays above sixty after dark, when the whole town comes outside at once. People drag chairs out. Somebody waves from across the street. Neighbors who have not talked since Thanksgiving end up standing in a driveway for an hour.

Nobody plans this. It happens on its own, and then it happens again the next night, and by the end of the week half the town is socializing outdoors.

If you grew up anywhere with real winters, you know this evening. It is the same everywhere. The only thing that changes is the month.

3. The tulip festival

Mid April, and it books out every room in town.

Holland Harbor fought hard for the county festivals a few years back. They used to be held one town over, and getting them moved here changed the local economy in a way that people still talk about. The tulip festival is the biggest of them. Every hotel fills, the bed and breakfast on the corner turns people away, and the overflow ends up in Braxton City and drives back in every morning.

The locals grumble about it every single year and then show up anyway, because the fields really are worth it and because everybody's cousin is selling something.

I put the epilogue of this book at the tulip festival, which felt right. It is a story about a man coming back to life, and it ends in a field of flowers with his whole family standing around him.

4. Getting ready before the tourists come

This is the least glamorous tradition and possibly my favorite one.

Somewhere around late March, every business in town starts scrubbing. Windows get washed. Awnings come down and go to be repaired. The salon reorders everything. The restaurant reworks the menu. The hardware store puts the beach chairs out front three weeks before anybody could reasonably want one.

There is a quiet urgency to it. Tourism is the lifeblood here, and a lot of these businesses make most of their money in about fourteen weeks. Everybody knows it. So the town spends spring holding its breath and getting ready, and when the first big weekend hits, they are ready.

5. Sunday dinner goes outside

At Waverly Farms, Sunday dinner is not optional. It happens whether you want it to or not, and you will be asked why you missed it if you skip and Cici will expect an answer.

All winter it happens around the big table inside. But the first Sunday it is warm enough, CiCi makes everybody carry the table out to the yard, and it stays out there until October. More chairs fit. The dogs are underfoot. Somebody's phone plays music nobody agreed on.

Every book in this series has a Sunday dinner scene, and I think the outdoor ones are the best ones. Something about a long table in a yard makes people say things they would not say inside.

What I love about writing a small town in spring

Spring is the season of getting ready. Everybody in Holland Harbor is preparing for something, whether that is a busy summer or a festival or just a life that looks a little different from the one they had last year.

That made it the right time to tell Carson's story. He has spent four years in a kind of long winter, keeping everybody laughing so nobody looks too closely. The town thaws out around him and he has to decide whether he is going to thaw out too.

Now I want to hear yours. What is the one spring tradition your town refuses to give up, no matter how silly it gets? Tell me in the comments. I collect these, and more of them end up in books than you would think.

See the full series here.