McAdenville's yarn: spurred by an enthusiastic textile family, the Gaston County town ranks among the best places to fire up the Christmas spirit.

• Author: Dodson, Jim
• Position: Town Square

In December 1956, a small group belonging to the Men's Club in McAdenville got the idea to decorate their village's modest community center with a few Christmas lights and decorations. "It was kind of an impromptu thing, done in the simple spirit of the season," remembers Steve Rankin, who grew up in the tiny Gaston County town and was 16 that year, working at Abernathy's Supermarket on Main Street.

The lights were warmly received by everyone in the town, he remembers, and especially appreciated by W.J. Pharr, the civic-minded president of Pharr Yarns LLC, the textile firm that owned most of the town and employed most of its residents.

"Mr. Pharr was so pleased with how those Christmas lights looked," says Rankin, "he suggested that they do it again the next year and maybe even expand the lights a bit. He even offered to pay for the decorations. That was really the start of it. But who could have imagined what it would grow into?"

Rankin means the Brobdingnagian Christmas lighting display that in time put wee McAdenville on the map of America's must-see, A-list, over-the-top decorated Christmas towns. In fact, after CBS News icon (and former Charlotte journalist) Charles Kuralt showed up to film a segment on the McAdenville Christmas lights for his popular Sunday morning TV show in 1980, the town officially adopted the moniker "Christmas Town USA."

Several years ago, Time magazine placed the lights of McAdenville on its coveted list of America's top 10 public Christmas displays, ranking the picturesque mill town the 9th most "Most Chrimassy" place in the nation, prompting a flood of national and international media attention to this quiet river town of just under 700 residents.

This month, an estimated 600,000 visitors--75% of whom hail from outside Gaston County--will make the pilgrimage to the town. By car or by foot, they will see a 1.5-mile stretch of McAdenville's charming brick Main Street and festively decked out residential district, taking in more than half a million red, white and green lights adorning porches, lamp-posts and several hundred Norway spruce trees around the town lake.

The annual light show commences at 5:30 p.m. sharp at the Pharr Family YMCA--formerly the village community center--on Dec. 1 when a lucky kid from McAdenville Elementary throws a switch that lights up the town. A local school choir will pipe out carols, and Christmas Town USA will be officially off and running. Lights that crews began putting up in...