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Andie MacDowell shares a meaningful holiday tradition with Carolina Home + Garden.
Students from Center Stage Dance Studio in Asheville help Andie MacDowell trim the tree.
Photo by David Dietrich
When her three children were little, Andie MacDowell created beloved holiday memories for them. As they grew, she encouraged them to become part of a tradition bigger than themselves.
Years ago, on Christmas morning, her children waited upstairs while mom started the coffee, heated up the cinnamon sticky buns and built a fire in the fireplace. Then she videotaped them as they came down the stairs to see what Santa had brought. They’d empty their stockings, eat some buns, then open presents.
However, this year, as has been true in recent years, Justin, now 25, Rainey, 22, and Sarah Margaret, 17, won’t exchange gifts. What they’ll share instead is something more meaningful: a tradition they started years ago.
The MacDowell house is a romantic storybook French Tudor in Biltmore Forest, designed by architect Robert Griffin (see Carolina Home + Garden, July 2008). It has always been a lively place.
Justin would bring in the guys on his basketball team. Rainey and Sarah Margaret, when they were students at Center Stage Dance Studio in Asheville, would have their friends and fellow dancers over. “Everybody came here to hang out,” says MacDowell, getting the kitchen ready to bake cookies with some young Center Stage dancers. “It’s such a great family house.”
A sweeping staircase connects the bedrooms upstairs to the light-filled family room downstairs. Tall windows frame the trees, gardens and rolling yard. A large fireplace shares a chimney with the waist-high wood-burning fireplace in the kitchen. The overall effect is understated elegance. The 10-year-old house looks like a house that children grew up in. Which is exactly what it is.
“I do think the house was built for children,” says the actress. Every Thanksgiving and Christmas, it seemed, her son would bring someone home who didn’t have anywhere else to spend the holidays. MacDowell would simply add more cinnamon buns to the shopping list and buy a few extra presents. Meanwhile, her children’s penchant for including friends at Christmas expanded the definition of family for everyone.
When they were younger, the kids certainly loved the toys they got at Christmas, and Andie cherished the books of promises they made for her — pledges to clean their rooms or give her a foot massage. But she felt ready to stretch that giving spirit even more.
“Ever since I was tiny, I’d ask for all these things and I’d get them and I never felt fulfilled,” she says, pulling butter and eggs for the cookies out of the refrigerator. “There was something that was really empty about that to me. I told my children about that, and they really got that. The anticipation of getting a lot of presents, and then it’s all over — I mean, what is that?”
So she asked her kids to think about what made them feel good about Christmas, long after they’d polished off their presents. They loved decorating for the holidays, they said. They loved talking about dishes they’d prepare, and they loved making them together. The “together” part was key.
And so 10 years ago they decided together to do something more meaningful on Christmas Eve. Every year since (except for last year when they were out of town), they’ve helped serve supper at Western Carolina Rescue Ministries. MacDowell says she’s always come away feeling lighter than when she went in.
“Remembering those who are alone, being aware and conscious of people who have no food, those are the kinds of things that ended up ‘feeding’ us and that made us feel the Christmas spirit.”
Now that her children are older, “They’re all off doing their thing,” says MacDowell. Justin is away at college, Sarah Margaret, a dancer, is taking art classes at an academically challenging high school in New York City and Rainey is off to a music career.
Nevertheless, her daughters will be in Asheville for the holidays — and, with friends from Center Stage, plan to make the Rescue mission one of their stops.
Meanwhile, Andie will continue to hold fundraising events at home, as she’s done for many years on behalf of Mission Hospital, Our VOICE, Asheville Humane Society and area arts organizations. She enjoys opening her house to help others because it fills it with the kind of “people energy” she’d gotten used to when her kids and their friends were there.
“For me, that’s what gives a house a soul,” says MacDowell, ready for the young dancers to arrive.
Makeup by Scott Thompson, Makeup at the Grove Arcade; Hair by Catherine Granicz and Ayse Korkmaz of Centro Hair Studio.
