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Would it be the humorous yard sign from "Tim, Bec and the girls" near the Dove Street menagerie on Hilton Head Island?
They have a clever drawing of "North Forest Beach Reindeer Auditions." It shows Santa on the beach in a loose, Hawaiian print shirt, red shorts and sandals. He's scratching his head at one contestant: A big green alligator with antlers and a red nose strapped on for the audition.
Now, that's Lowcountry.
But then I found what appeared to the perfect Lowcountry display on a white mantel piece. It was in the antebellum Honey Horn home, now the Coastal Discovery Museum.
It was large pine cones, red berries, a cluster of shiny oyster shells and twisted threads of gray Spanish moss, all resting in a green pine bough. Perfect!
But then a friend commented, "The tourists don't need to know there are redbugs nesting in the Spanish moss, nasty thorns just waiting in the pyracantha, and oyster shells particularly chosen to slice little fingers, now do they? It's how we keep the kids from messing with the decorations! They only do it once."
To prove she wasn't a Lowcountry Scrooge, she added, "I absolutely love these types of installations, but where, oh where, are the magnolia leaves, pecans and hickory nuts?"
Beaufort has a sleigh full of magnolias -- and beautiful gate decorations.
Plants of every shade of red and green adorn the wrought iron gate at a home in The Point neighborhood. "Petit Point" is written into the black gate wrapped with red and gold ribbon and bows.
Around the corner, a gate wreath is a simple circle of long green pine needles with a red and white checked bow.
That's almost perfect. But around another corner a red bow looks dashing on a gate of tall white slats with little dog carvings. The bow is tied to fresh Lowcountry greenery and slivers of moss. Behind it all is a palmetto frond, its sharp green leaves pointing down like rays from a special star.
Uptown, "Miss Beaufort" dives into Christmas at Bellamy Curve. She's sporting a Santa cap as she seems to swim through our thick air toward the breathtaking Beaufort River.
This fiberglass beauty was part of The Big Swim promotion by the Arts Council of Beaufort County. The creatively painted mermaids, they said, "will entice people to walk through our neighborhoods, to drive around the city, and even to drive across the country to be in their presence."
Guarding the entrance to the historic town of Port Royal is a statue of a stern-looking lady bearing a shield -- and now a big red and white Santa cap.
Window shopping on funky Calhoun Street in Bluffton turns up a "Noel" banner at Eggs-N-Tricities. There's a "The Real World" arrow in the window, which is, of course, pointing elsewhere.
Eat your hearts out, Manhattan window-shoppers.
A sign at the head of a dirt driveway on Bluffton's Bridge Street guided guests on a recent Saturday to a party inside. The sign stood by a wire basket stuffed with red, green, gold and purple ornaments, holly berries and a palmetto frond.
The sign said, "Christmas State of Mind." It's a takeoff on a favorite old bumper sticker: "Bluffton is a State of Mind."
That's Lowcountry.
We should quit clinking glasses and nibbling hors d'oeuvres long enough to appreciate the graves in the Beaufort National Cemetery now marked with green wreaths with red bows.
And perhaps we could learn why the bows in wreaths on the doors of our historic Episcopal churches -- St. Helena's in Beaufort and the Church of the Cross in Bluffton -- are purple instead of red.
At the door of Mount Calvary Missionary Baptist Church on Hilton Head stands a special crèche. Its stable looks handmade with cypress. A floodlight shines on a baby in a manger, resting on a green palmetto frond and fine lavender cloth. Internally-lit figures of Mary and Joseph kneel by the baby, making it clear that this Holy Family is not white or Anglo-Saxon.
A black angel plays a long golden horn in an oak tree in a festive yard near Simmons Fish Camp on the shores of Hilton Head's Broad Creek. The fish camp has the outline of a green Christmas tree with red bow on its door.
In the Harbour Town Clubhouse, a dazzling Christmas tree is stroked with tartan ribbons and bows.
A pig sculpture at the door of the Seagrass Grille on Hilton Head has a red and green boa around its ample neck, and a Santa cap.
These displays all reflect joy, with a Lowcountry twist.
But it shouldn't take a lot to find joy these days.
In a more challenging era, Northern missionaries came to Beaufort County as school teachers as soon at Union troops freed the enslaved masses on these islands. And at this time of year, so far from their comfortable homes in Philadelphia or Boston, they, too, searched the Lowcountry for Christmas cheer.
What they found to brighten up the stately interior of the Brick Baptist Church on St. Helena Island came not from stores, but from "delightful rambles" into our Lowcountry woods.
Their decorations were simple, natural and understated.
Teacher Charlotte Forten paints in her diary on Dec. 23, 1862, a picture of the church decorations.
"They would insist upon my dressing up the pulpit, which I was unwilling to do, for that is the most conspicuous place," she wrote. "I made a drapery all around it with the lovely hanging moss, and a heading of casino berries and holly. It looks quite pretty."
On Christmas Eve, they were back at it, two teachers making festoons while Forten made wreaths for the walls.
"In the afternoon," Forten wrote, "Miss Ware came, bringing evergreen letters of the words 'His People Are Free.' "
Those words may be forgotten in a musty diary. Or they may be the perfect Lowcountry Christmas decoration.
