Have a Ball at the Bicentennial Birthday Bash!
by Rachel Olson
This Christmas brings to a close a very important year in Florida history – 2024 is the 200th birthday of the founding of our capital, Tallahassee. To celebrate this once-in-a-lifetime anniversary before it slips away (and to engage in holiday cheer), Theater with a Mission (TWAM) invites you to join us in a monumental final hurrah: a three-day-long Bicentennial Birthday Bash, filled to the brim with free food, free festivities, and free family fun! This history-making party takes place on December 27th-29th at Goodwood Museum & Gardens in Tallahassee, lighting up that dull space on your calendar just after Christmas and just before the New Year rolls in.
TWAM’s Bicentennial Birthday Bash includes entertainment and engagement for guests of all ages. Kids and adults alike can get hands-on with Florida history, immersing themselves in the kinds of activities that partygoers enjoyed in 1824. Dramatic reenactments and storytelling will captivate your mind. Dance will captivate your feet as you step into the rhythms that delighted dancers 200 years ago. The animals in our petting zoo will captivate the little hands in your family (and the big ones as well), as will making evergreen decorations and candles just like families did at Christmas time in 19th-century Florida. Once the kids have been tucked in, adults can return for a Territorial Ball for All on Saturday evening, where you will dance, dine, and enjoy the drama with other time-travelers, all decked out in your 1820s best. To make this trek through history unforgettable, all the fun will be memorialized in take-home souvenir photos!
You will find insightful education woven in with your plentiful entertainment. Settlers from Spanish, French, African, Cracker, and planter backgrounds all partied in territorial Tallahassee. Come out and learn about Native American stickball, to see how Florida’s earliest inhabitants had fun. (You’ll get a chance to try scoring a goal yourself.) Get ready to ring in the New Year with style, using 200 years of Tallahassee toasts. Dive into the holiday spirit with a Las Posadas procession – reliving what Tallahassee’s first Christmas would have looked like and tapping into Florida’s Spanish heritage. Then take a seat to watch TWAM bring you face to face with the Florida legislature’s first meeting in Tallahassee in Tales from Florida’s Log Cabin Capitol, a dramatic reenactment based on primary-source research.
After you have learned, danced, and played, place yourself in the role of a cross-century culinary judge with one of the weekend’s tantalizing food offerings: Leon County birthday cakes. To button the Bash festivities, TWAM will slice three cakes: one from a 200-year-old recipe, one from a 100-year-old recipe, and one from a recipe created less than a year ago. Only by sampling all three can you put to rest one final, critical question: which Bicentennial cake is the best?
For more information about the Bicentennial Birthday Bash, including a full event schedule, free registration, the event address, and more, visit TWAM’s website at https://www.theaterwithamission.com/. You can also follow TWAM on FB, IG, X, and Tik-Tok for more updates on the Bicentennial Birthday Bash and TWAM’s many other free events that bring history to life. We hope to see you at the Bash, ready to have a ball!
