Mortgage Broker in West Columbia, SC

The Greater Cayce-West Columbia Chamber believes the holidays are the perfect time for a community-wide celebration, where everyone can shop, dine, and support local businesses, all while jingling their way through the season. That’s why they’re thrilled to spread some holiday cheer in West Columbia this weekend.

Get ready for Parade Day from 12 p.m. to 4 p.m. Guests can skip the trip to the North Pole and head straight to the Cayce-West Columbia Chamber Office at 1006 12th St., which will be transformed into a winter wonderland. Enjoy family-friendly fun, live music, activities, and much more.

Throughout the day, visitors can hop on the Holiday Parade Day Shuttle, which runs a loop around Cayce and West Columbia. The shuttle will make stops at local shops, restaurants, and businesses—making it easy to shop, dine, and sleigh the day away.

The highlight of the weekend is the spectacular Holiday Parade of Lights. Last year, more than 24,000 people gathered to watch the streets light up with thousands of twinkling lights, vibrant floats, and festive vehicles. The parade begins at 5:30 p.m., lighting up the night with holiday magic. This year’s Parade Grand Marshal will be Lexington County Council Lady Debbie Summers, who is retiring after two decades of dedicated service to the community.

The NOMA (North Main) Business Association and Peak Drift Brewing Company are proud to present the fifth annual Light Up NOMA & Cookie Crawl, sponsored by Chavis Painting, with expanded offerings throughout the day in the N. Main Street corridor.

In 2019, the NOMA Business Association launched the annual holiday event to celebrate the rich traditions of the season, as well as the diverse businesses and neighborhood culture on N. Main Street in the NOMA District. Light Up NOMA & Cookie Crawl honors the culture, beauty, and spirit of the N. Main Street community as the best place to be in Columbia during the holiday season.

This annual fundraiser has grown into a daylong community event along N. Main St. and Monticello Road. The day begins with breakfast with Santa Claus, followed by the Light Up NOMA Parade featuring Grand Marshal City of Columbia Councilwoman Tina Herbert. Participants can shop for gifts at the Holiday Market, explore the Neighborhood Holiday Showcase, and vote for the best-decorated wreath or tree. The event continues with the NOMA Cookie Crawl, where attendees can sample treats throughout the district, and concludes with the NOMA tree lighting. The entire schedule for the day and tickets for the event can be found here.

Breakfast with Santa

Kick off the morning with some festive cheer that includes breakfast, photos with Santa, holiday crafts, and an ugly sweater contest. Breakfast with Santa begins at 8 a.m. and ends around 10 a.m. in the cafeteria at Eau Claire High School, located at 4800 Monticello Road, Columbia. Tickets are $5 for kids and $10 for anyone older than 13.

Parade and Market

Feel the holiday spirit by taking in the Light Up NOMA Parade with Grand Marshal City Councilwoman Tina Herbert. The one-mile-long parade will feature marching bands, dance troupes, colorful floats, live music, and a special guest from the North Pole. The parade will start at 11 a.m. on Ridgeway St. at Monticello Road and conclude around 1 p.m. on Monticello Road at N. Main St.

You can do some last minute Christmas shopping at the Holiday Market, where attendees can discover unique gifts, taste delicious treats, and experience the warmth of the NOMA community. Santa Claus will also be on hand from 1 to 3 p.m. for free photos, live entertainment, and a fashion show featuring Ashley Stewart designs. The Holiday Market will open at 10 a.m. at Leroy Moss Multipurpose Center, 950 Jackson Ave., Columbia.

Cookie Crawl

The NOMA Cookie Crawl is $20 per cookie tin. This year, NOMA is offering VIP cookie tins for $35, which include a choice between a 4-pack of Peak Drift Brewing Co.’s seltzer or beer for guests who are at least 21 years old, a $10 gift card, and a one-hour free bowling lane pass to The Grand. There are only 250 tins available, and this event has sold out before. People must pick up their cookie tin between 2:30 and 4:30 p.m. at Peak Drift Brewing Company, located at 3452 N. Main St., at their back dock off Phillips St. However, attendees can continue the crawl at participating locations until 6 p.m. The event will culminate with the annual NOMA tree lighting at the Carolina Kernels parking lot.

NOMA encourages crawlers to park at Earlewood Park, located at 1113 Recreation Drive, after driving to the second stop at Got Milk from Peak Drift. Transportation will be provided by The COMET directly to many of the Cookie Crawl locations.

This year, there will be 12 cookie flavors featured on the crawl: red velvet, chocolate chip, cream cheese, ginger, butter ornaments, candy cane, banana pudding, peppermint bark, butter robot cookies, snowball, and lemon drop. The cookies on the NOMA Cookie Crawl may contain or be created in a location that contains the top nine allergens: milk, eggs, fish, shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat, soybeans, and corn.

“The NOMA district offers a wonderful opportunity for everyone to celebrate the holiday season,” said Sabrina Odom Edwards, executive director of the NOMA Business Association. “This year, we’ve expanded the NOMA Cookie Crawl into an all-day event with more activities to highlight the N. Main Street community and what it offers to Soda Citizens. We’re excited to host this family-friendly holiday event for the fifth year.”

Proceeds from the event support the NOMA Business District, helping fund year-round events and gatherings to promote the district and its merchants to the Columbia and Midlands community. Tickets for the crawl can be purchased here.

On Friday afternoon, Paul Bessinger could be found doing what he has been doing for decades at 1600 Charleston Highway in West Columbia: cooking pork barbecue at Maurice’s Piggie Park.

But this Friday was more monumental than many others. It was, in many ways, the opening overture in a comeback for the decades-old barbecue company.

The main Maurice’s location in West Columbia has reopened just days after a raging, 3-alarm Oct. 26 fire destroyed the company’s distribution center, food prep area and administrative offices. The blaze led to the temporary closure of Maurice’s eight locations across the Midlands, as owners grappled to begin the recovery from the incident.

The main West Columbia Maurice’s location quietly reopened on Thursday evening. When a pair of reporters from The State stopped by early on Friday afternoon, customers were enjoying meals in the dining room and cars were lined up at the drive-thru, with residents ordering ribs, Little Joe sandwiches and more.

Paul Bessinger, co-owner and pitmaster at Maurice’s, was posted up outside the restaurant Friday, tending to two large smokers. One of the smokers was salvaged from inside the portion of the complex that was ravaged by fire. Aqua Seal Roofing was able to use its crane to lift the smoker from its previous spot in the complex and set it down in the parking lot. The second smoker in use Friday was borrowed from Paul Bessinger’s cousin, Michael Bessinger, from Charleston.

Other Midlands Maurice’s locations were still listed on Google as temporarily closed as of Friday, but Paul Bessinger hinted at quiet reopenings of some of them with a “scaled back” menu. The Elmwood Avenue location in downtown Columbia, for instance, was open early Friday afternoon with limited offerings.

Paul, who is the son of late company founder Maurice Bessinger, noted the current temporary setup for cooking barbecue doesn’t come close to the scale of normal operations. But he said it’s a start.

“We are just trying to keep it open over here, to keep people happy and the customers here, and to do a little bit of business,” Paul said. “We are testing what we are doing and trying to see what the future is going to hold and how we are going to operate.”

The co-owner and pitmaster said the company is exploring the possibility of renting another space in the area to temporarily scale up cooking, but noted that “doesn’t happen overnight.”

Paul said he was at his new home at Lake Murray — it was his first night at the house— on Oct. 26 when he got word of the fire at the Maurice’s West Columbia complex.

“I came running back here,” he said. “Of course, I’m 45 minutes away, and I was breaking every speed limit to get back here and find out what was going on.”

Cody Bessinger is Paul’s son, and is the plant manager at Maurice’s facility in West Columbia. On Friday, as he watched over ribs cooking on a smoker, Cody said it was harrowing to see parts of the complex destroyed in the Oct. 26 blaze.

“It was a lot of years of hard work gone in an instant,” Cody said. “Your mind goes to how big of an uphill climb we are going to have to climb to get back into (a production facility) like that, to provide for eight locations.”

Cody said it was heartwarming to see customers coming back in West Columbia.

“We’ve got a big community following,” the plant manager said. “We’ve been here forever, and a lot of people have been eating here since they were children.”

As a reporter from The State was talking to Paul Bessinger near the temporary smoking station in the Maurice’s parking lot on Friday, a customer drove up and excitedly asked whether the restaurant was open. When informed that it was, the customer whipped his vehicle around and went to the drive-thru speaker to order.

The restaurant co-owner said he has appreciated customers’ enthusiasm about Maurice’s getting to a spot where they can reopen.

“The few days we were closed in [West Columbia], there were people walking up all day asking if we were open,” Paul said. “People were coming from all over.”

Paul asked for customers to be patient as Maurice’s in West Columbia begins to find its footing again, though he noted with a bit of a nervous laugh that he knows people might be a bit “high-strung” on Nov. 2 as Texas A&M comes to town to face South Carolina at Williams-Brice Stadium.

While long a popular brand, Maurice’s has a complicated legacy in the Midlands. Founder Maurice Bessinger once stocked white-supremacist literature and audiotapes at the restaurants, and flew the Confederate flag outside the eateries after the symbol was moved off the State House dome in 2000. However, his children have stripped those elements from the business, pushing to escape those lingering associations.

“As a family now, we don’t dabble any in politics, in a negative light,” Paul Bessinger told journalist Jordan Lawrence during a 2023 conversation. “We just try to serve the world’s best barbecue, and that’s all we try to do.”

This story was originally published November 1, 2024, 1:34 PM.

The State

Chris Trainor is a retail reporter for The State and has been working for newspapers in South Carolina for more than 20 years, including previous stops at the (Greenwood) Index-Journal and the (Columbia) Free Times. He is the winner of numerous South Carolina Press Association awards, including honors in column writing, government beat reporting, profile writing, food writing, business beat reporting, election coverage, social media and more.