Nashville might not be the first city that comes to mind when it comes to celebrating Christmas, but it should be.

Among America’s top Christmas vacation spots are Asheville’s lavishly decorated Biltmore Mansion, a wintery Bavarian village in Leavenworth, Washington, and the holiday sights and sounds of New York City or New Orleans. And, there’s the nearby lure of an activity-filled, old-fashioned Christmas in the Smokies.

Nashvillians have always been more traditional in their holiday habits, visiting neighbors, taking in a school pageant and attending holiday-themed musical performances.

But lately, with so many new residents itching to show off their homes to visiting family and friends – and longtime residents willing to shed their time-worn Christmas traditions – expanding the area’s tourism momentum has taken on added urgency.

Folks are gearing up for holiday events as if Santa himself were paying a visit.

And with just around 90 days to go, it’s time to get the planning started.

Gaylord sparks holiday tourism

A Country Christmas at Gaylord Opryland Resort attracts more than 1 million visitors annually, drawn by the 2.3 million holiday lights, nine acres of indoor gardens filled with over-the-top holiday decorations and an array of family-friendly shows and attractions unique to the season.

The resort’s annual event – now in its 33rd year - has been hailed as one of the “Ten Great Places to Catch up with Santa” by USA Today. The resort itself has been named “The Most Christmassy Hotel in the Nation” by the Travel Channel’s Extreme Christmas program.

Recently it was named one of the top 10 places to spend Christmas in the world by Travel + Leisure.

But it hasn’t always been that way.

Jenny Barker, PR and marketing director for Gaylord Opryland Resort and Convention Center, says the idea to have a Christmas celebration was born out of need to boost occupancy numbers for the predominately group- and convention-business hotel.

“During the holidays it tends to be a slower time for conventions, so the idea was put on the table to try to make a holiday destination out of the hotel, and it worked,” Barker says.

“It used to be that the hotel was closed toward the end of the year because there just wasn’t enough business to support it being open.

With more than two million lights illuminating the way at Gaylord Opryland Resort, tourists are increasingly finding their way to Middle Tennessee for the holidays.

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“A Country Christmas changed all of that.”

Barker says the now-much-anticipated event has grown every year. The hotel now attracts about a million visitors between mid-November and January 1. And while not everyone is staying in one of the nearly 3,000 rooms on site, many are.

“Folks coming in for a one- or two-night stay, it’s easy to get to those numbers,” Barker explains.

“We put our Christmas packages on sale in July when our four horticulturists start hanging those two million lights on the Magnolia Lawn, and the popular weekends in December sell out very, very quickly.”

And those Christmas bookings are key to the resort’s bottom line.

“It’s definitely important to us,” Barker says. “You always want to finish strong, so this allows us to do that.”

Butch Spyridon, President and CEO of the Nashville Convention and Visitors Corp., says Gaylord Opryland put Nashville on the holiday map with bus tours that visit leading up to Christmas, and that Cheekwood and other attractions have really started to expand on holiday offerings as well.

Still, the holidays are traditionally a slow season in the hotel industry nationwide, especially Christmas week, because people are staying with family and friends.

Occupancy during Christmas week in Nashville is low, about 40 percent to 42 percent, compared with annual averages of 69 percent to 74 percent.

“Major events, like the Music City Bowl and the city’s New Year’s Eve celebration, help us fill hotel rooms during this slow period,” Spyridon explains.

“Last year, the Jack Daniel’s Bash on Broadway: New Year’s Eve in Music City was attended by a record 150,000 and sold a record 24,000 hotel rooms – a virtual sell-out in the city.”

Locals drive traditions

Barker has been working on Gaylord Opryland’s Christmas 2016 since January and is already talking about what to do for Christmas 2017 and beyond. Lately, those talks have included making the event more localized.

Belmont Mansion offers visitors a glimpse of holiday traditions from the 19th century. Tours, which begin the weekend after Thanksgiving, are offered 10 a.m.-3:30 p.m. and depart every 30 minutes.

-- Courtesy Of Nashville Convention & Visitors Corporation

“From a strategy standpoint, we’re way ahead of it, but implementation-wise, it really gets started in July,” she says. “I think each year we’re trying to balance bringing back those favorite traditions, but introducing things that are new and just taking it to the next level.”

For example, last year they reimagined all of the decorations in the garden conservatory section of the hotel to give it more of Music City feel. Visitors walking through are greeted with giant guitars hanging from the ceiling, along with instruments and music notes to give visitors that sense of place, that they are in Music City.

“It certainly is a Nashville Christmas tradition, and I think with having 33 years of history that’s part of what has made it so successful,” she says.

“Folks who experienced it early on wanted to bring their kids and now their grandkids. We hear every year from families that take their Christmas card picture in front of our poinsettia trees. There’s so much tradition that goes into it and it’s about making holiday memories.”

In fact, after Barker’s family first visited her for the holidays after she moved to Nashville from Virginia in 2001, taking in the lights at Opry has become at the top of the list.

“It is the thing to do,” Barker says. “We went to the hotel and looked at the decorations and just had a good time.”

Barker does realize how crazy the lines can get to see the lights though, especially with mall shoppers and the nearby Music Valley’s Jellystone light exhibit, so she recommends locals come out on a weeknight, especially toward the beginning of December before the kids are all out of school.

“The mall traffic next door tends to be a little less,” she says.

ICE! – the resort’s signature holiday event for more than a decade – boasts two million pounds of colorful hand-carved ice sculptures and ice slides standing more than two stories tall.

Chillers are being installed now, and the hotel is getting all of the prep work done to be ready for the artisans’ October arrival. By then, the hotel will have already worked with distributors to get the ice pre-colored and delivered.

Cheekwood will be aglow inside and out with one million twinkling lights, real reindeer, s’mores pits, a Christie Cookie Co. sweets shop, holiday carolers, hot chocolate and hot toddies.

-- Courtesy Of Nashville Convention & Visitors Corporation

“ICE is the one common theme that goes through all four hotels,” Barker adds. “The theme is different at each of those hotels, but you’ll have at each property 40 artisans from Harbin, China, and it will take them about a month to carve the two million pounds of ice sculptures.”

Harbin, China, is known as “Ice City” and is home to the annual Ice and Snow Festival featuring massive structures and sculptures. This year in Nashville will be the first time Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer will ever be produced in an ice show, a result of guest surveys after past productions.

“It’s been a theme that guests have asked about for years, and we were finally able to make it happen this year,” she says.

Early planning key

Other businesses don’t need to worry about carving millions of pounds of ice or hanging just as many twinkling lights to get an early start on Christmas prep.

Jerry Trescott, Belmont Mansion’s associate curator, says planning for the holidays at the historic Acklen home began in July with committees meeting on everything from the Christmas at Belmont Mansion dinner to the luncheon the next day.

“They’re major fundraisers for us every year, which does quite well for us usually,” Trescott says of the sell-out events.

Different specialized tours just for the season also are a draw, like this year’s curator’s tour geared toward Christmas traditions in the 19th Century. And, of course, there are all of the decorations that are carefully chosen to match the traditions of the period, like feather trees made from turkey feathers.

The decorated house opens to the public the weekend after Thanksgiving.

“We spend about a week putting all the Christmas decorations up. Then people flock to this house from November to the first week of January,” Trescott says. Generally, the decorations come down January 6th.

The university also hosts several events open to the public during the holiday season, like the Christmas at Belmont concert, which usually ends up being standing room only.

Trescott says the number of visitors to the mansion has grown tremendously over the years, even outside of the holiday season. They have even had some of their best years ever in the past two or three.

“There’s a lot of people just coming to town using this as a vacation venue, and that’s helped us quite a bit,” he points out.

They have even had to adjust the types of tours they do over the last six months to accommodate the numbers, changing from a revolving tour that just started over and over again to a timed tour every 30 minutes from 10 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.

“That has worked out much better for us,” he says. “Sometimes people have to wait a few minutes, but they stay with the same tour guide through the entire tour and they’re able to develop a rapport. It works very well.”

The central parlor restoration at Belmont Mansion is scheduled to be open in time for Christmas, the culmination of a two-year project.

“I think it will make a big difference for the numbers in this house,” Trescott says. “We were able to find original finishes on almost every surface in the room, and we have a majority of furniture that was in that room that we’ve had restored in the last year.

“We’re moving frames and paintings back to their original locations this year that have been scattered throughout the house. We now know exactly where certain things hung.”

Each year Trescott says they get the house more and more like it was when the Acklens lived there, to make the home feel totally lived-in, when people walk through.

And this year that even includes stashing gifts wrapped in 19th Century wrapping in the bedrooms, decorating those rooms for the holidays for the first time ever this year.

“Bringing more of the family and life back into the house, that’s what’s important,” he says. “To make the house seem alive.”

Traditions evolve with Nashville

Kelly Field with Gray Line Tours says the family-run company that has been operating since 1972 and has been able to grow along with the city. The company has evolved from one 16-passenger van the Levering brothers used to drive themselves to today’s 140 pieces of equipment, including an 85-passenger open air double decker, a 56-passenger motor coach and a 25-person trolley.

“We’ve done some different things over the years as we have grown in Nashville,” Field says, including their Twinkling Tennessee tour that travels around the decorated homes in South Nashville off Franklin Road with the 25-passenger mini bus, then going to the Lotz House in Franklin for a tour of their decorations along with cookies and hot chocolate.

Their Music City Hop line runs year-round on the open air double-deckers and trolleys around downtown Nashville, and Field recommends it for a way to get holiday shopping done without having to worry about parking and traffic. There are 15 stops, including Marathon Village and The Gulch.

“You could do some shopping while at the same time exploring downtown Nashville,” she says.

And this year they have added another new tour that will take in the decorations at Cheekwood.

“Cheekwood has done something really phenomenal with their holiday lights, decorating their gardens and the home of the Cheek family for the holidays and it’s just beautiful,” Field points out.

“What we’ll do is we’ll leave from a central location in Nashville and we’ll go down to Cheekwood and let everyone off the trolley.

“We’ll probably decorate the trolley, sing some Christmas carols and do some fun games, and then they’ll go over to Cheekwood and they can walk the gardens, see the reindeer, decorate a cookie, make a s’more, get some hot chocolate, and just walk around the lovely gardens that are decorated for the holidays like a winter wonderland.”

Field says it is those types of holiday traditions that Nashville families are looking for, events they can invest in annually that will mean something to their loved ones when they remember Christmas in Music City for years to come.

“You can sit around and only do so much around the house, and you can only spend so much time shopping,” she says. “You want to get out and do things together.

“I think it’s a great way to get the family out of the house and visiting people and showing a little bit more of what our city has to offer.”