BUCHANAN, Va. – It’s the season for traditions, and one local community has a decades long Christmas eve tradition that lights up the whole town.
Bringing light to a town at its darkest time. A flood that swarmed the town of Buchanan left the locals with no water. Neighboring town sent gallon jugs of water to help during the November flood starting a tradition in December to repurpose the jugs as luminaries.
“It lights up the town, it makes it really happy and homey,” Grayson Preece, a volunteer said.
Hundreds of jugs line the sidewalks of Main Street to commemorate the flood of 1985, now the Buchanan locals call it a Christmas eve tradition.
“I feel like Buchanan is a town that’s very much about doing things that bring us all together, and so whether it’s the Buchanan theatre where people volunteer to work or setting out luminaries, there’s a lot of things we do around here that are very much about community and working together to build our community,” Preece said.
Multiple volunteers were all hands-on deck lining the street for their big holiday tradition.
“We set them out from the bridge where you enter Buchanan all the way to the exit on main street which is also route 11. And it covers all the churches lined in front of each individual church,” Buchanan Town Manager, George Hayfield said.
And for people who have lived here almost their entire life, volunteering to help set up and light the luminaries is a holiday tradition.
“Especially now that I’m going to college, every time I come home, I get to come here and be a part of Buchanan again,” Preece said.
And once dusk hit, community members lit the candles to brighten the streets of Buchanan for another Christmas Eve.