The Southern Mercantile was thrilled to be a part of the annual "Mistletoe Market" this year in Perry, GA.  We had a blast getting to set up a mini Southern Mercantile store.  Here's our finished product, what do you think?  

We introduced our favorite soaps in our favorite scents.  These shea butter soaps from France feel like such a treat!  Who can go wrong with lavender, white gardenia, sage and mirabelle.  These soaps are now available in the store and they make a perfect hostess gift or stocking stuffer!  Click HERE to shop!

We had the opportunity to meet new people and make some new friends! We served our special "spiced percolator punch" as a special treat to those who stopped by.  It was such a hit, we're sharing the recipe below!  

Our Maileg bunnies, angels and mice were a huge hit!  We have restocked our "Littles" category and they are all available now!

One of the highlights of the weekend was getting to meet James Farmer!  We just love all of his books and have carried them in the store for years.  You guys can nab one of your own by clicking HERE!  

Next weekend we are headed to Jacksonville, FL to participate in the "Vintage Market Days of Jacksonville".  If you are in the Jacksonville area drop by and visit with us!  We'll be hitting the road to some new places in the new year, so we'll keep you posted on our schedule.  If we're ever in your neighborhood we would love to meet ya!  

Hot Spiced Percolator Punch
(makes 22 servings)

Ingredients

• 1 (64 fluid ounce) bottle unsweetened pineapple juice
• 1 (64 fluid ounce) bottle cranberry juice cocktail
• 4 1/2 cups water
• 1 cup brown sugar, packed

 

• 2 tablespoons whole cloves
• 4 (4 inch) cinnamon sticks, broken
• 1/4 teaspoon salt

Directions

1. Pour the pineapple juice, cranberry juice, and water into a clean, well-washed coffee percolator. Place the brown sugar, cloves, cinnamon sticks, and salt in the basket of the percolator, and assemble the coffee percolator. Cover, plug in the cord, and perk. Serve hot.

Be sure to join our Recipe Club to have access to all of our wonderful recipes!  

Every year I host a Christmas Open House at my shop in Ocilla, GA.  This event has grown and grown and has become the thing I look most forward to! On the 2nd Sunday in November the shop is flooded with folks who are excited to ring in the Holiday season and are especially excited about a fun time to gather together and visit with each other.

Every year I choose a different theme and my merry crew and I go to work planning the details! This year we had a twenties themed party and invited everyone to come and "have a roaring good time"! We plan for this event throughout the year, ordering most of our Christmas merchandise in January and then working on various behind-the-scenes projects.  The closer it gets to the date, the later the work nights become!  The shop is closed the day before the event and all the decorating takes place that day.  I like to save as much as I can for the last minute so the shop looks totally different when folks come through the doors on Sunday.  Though, it is an exhausting undertaking, it is so worth the final product! I could not do it without the hard work of my sweet family, friends and Shoppes team members that work tirelessly alongside me! It brings me great joy to see the happiness and excitement on the faces of all those who enter my doors here, and it is that joy that drives me to push myself to do it again year after year!

You can see that the finished product is well worth all of the hard work!  

I have been saving these vintage elevator signs for two years, just for this Christmas and boy, were they worth the wait!  

Thanks so much to any of you local fans that joined us on Sunday! Wasn't it such a fun day?  I hope you all enjoy these beautiful pictures; maybe it will give you a little inspiration for your upcoming holiday parties!

This year, we had a very special guest at Open House.  One of our online Southern Mercantile friends made the trip to Ocilla to check out the festivities.  Mrs. Juni, you just don't know what a blessing you were to Tara, Jorjanne, and me on Sunday. We were all three teary-eyed at the end of the night as Jorj told the story of you talking with her while in line.  Thank you for taking the time to join us, to speak to each of us and to encourage us.  It means the world to know that people are reading, enjoying and feeling part of our community!  Thank you!
​-Roxie 

In my last update, I gave you a tour of the new layout of our home.  Although it was called Beech Street Bungalow: The Walls, we didn't have actual walls up yet! In this post you will get to see the transformation that the floors made as well as the sheetrock!  We have had an exciting past few weeks and I can't wait to share it all with you.

Just in case you have forgotten what the floors were like when we purchased the home, here is a little refresher.  Most rooms in this home exposed the original hard wood floors.  In a few areas, we had carpet and layers of linoleum to remove. (And when I say layers, I mean LAYERS!)  

​The hallway and the kitchen became our biggest challenge due to the type of adhesive that was used to lay the linoleum flooring years ago. Whoever put this flooring down did not intend for it to come back up. :)  

The pictures above are a small glimpse of what our hallway looked like--can you say yuck?!  I spent countless hours trying to peel, scrape and dig it up! After many google searches and multiple chats with knowledgeable floor men, I realized that absolutely no one had the magic formula to removing this mess.  Through trial and error, I found that my handy dandy multi-tool was a great help in removing the layer of linoleum from the glue.  This is not a speedy process nor is it fun--and if you're not careful, you will dig into the wood!

The laundry detergent softened the adhesive and made it easier for me to scrape it using a 5 in 1 tool.  Although this seemed to help, it did not remove the tough spots.  The detergent softened not only the adhesive, but also the wood.  This caused a problem when I began to scrape making it easier to dig into the wood floor resulting in deep gashes.  

As it turned out, the angle grinder worked!  However, it did take what seemed like forever and it was completely disgusting. 

We wore respirators to keep from breathing what the grinder was throwing up in the air.  We went  to such extreme measures to remove this adhesive because we were planning to refinish the floors ourselves.  This adhesive would ruin too much sand paper to try to sand it off with the floor sander.  

After a couple of weeks, Phillip and I finally decided to contract out the rest of the floors.  We were running out of time and energy!  We had saved enough money to hire Burris Cleaning out of Fitzgerald, GA to come in and sand, stain and polyurethane our entire house! Alfonso (pictured on the right) was such a pleasure to work with.  He and his team were so dedicated, honest, hard working and kind.  We couldn't have had a better experience and we're so thankful that they came to the rescue!

Now, the moment you've all been waiting for...
​Take a look at our beautiful new floors! (And walls!!)

Little by little, it's all coming together.  We are so proud to have the floors restored to their original beauty and we can't wait to enjoy them for years to come!  

The older I get, the more I grow to love Fall! Cooler mornings, turning leaves, the scent of freshly-dug peanuts have all become a few of my favorite things. I love how going back to school puts our family back in a routine after the freedom of summer. I also love celebrating the season at family reunions, fall festivals, really any holiday gathering. 

Our family truly enjoys participating in our church’s “Trick-Or-Trunk,” which is our Halloween/Fall Festival type celebration. Since our church is located way out in the country, most children in our church don't get to go trick-or-treating. (Side note: I went trick-or-treating one time when I was a kid. My mama had to call ahead to let folks know we were coming to their house so they would be prepared to pass out candy. I think we drove around for two hours, visited 4-5 houses, and received a handful of candy. I did have an awesome “Bride of Frankenstein” costume, thanks to my crafty mama!) Stories like mine are what inspired “Trick-or-Trunk.” Church members park their cars in a circle, with their trunks facing inside the circle. They open and decorate their trunks, then once it gets dark, pass out candy to the children as they walk around the circle in their cute costumes. For many of these kids, it’s the only chance they have to trick-or-treat. For many of the adults, it’s a fun time to get dressed up, escape reality, and just enjoy themselves for a little while! 

Throughout the years, our family has dressed up in various themes, usually in homemade costumes. It’s become a sort of tradition to decide what we’re going to be, then figure out how to make the costumes. Many times we’ve been superheroes and villains, but also movie characters, and this year - a family of trophies! My boys were champion tennis and soccer player trophies, while my husband and I snuck in a bit of adult humor: his plaque read “I Tried (participation award),” and mine read “World’s Okayest Runner!” We just love to have fun together!

This fall, we’ve already had two family reunions, are helping host a church youth retreat, have attended two festivals with more on the calendar, in addition to regular family and church holiday celebrations coming up. Now, you know that here in the South, we enjoy our celebrations, and the fact that they always revolve around food! And, confession time: I, like so many others, love pumpkin-flavored anything - I get positively giddy at my first pumpkin-spiced latte of the season! Since we have so many gatherings, I have a few recipes that I keep in mind to bring to the table. Harvest Cobb Salad is a great one, with sliced apples and pears, toasted pecans, dried cranberries, boiled eggs, and poppy seed dressing. Of course, green bean or hash brown casseroles are traditional, and usually enjoyed by most folks. I always like to bring something a little different, though. This year, I took a bread pudding recipe I’ve made many times and swapped a out a few ingredients to make a yummy Pumpkin Raisin-Bread Pudding! Even my boys, who don’t care much for bread pudding, loved it! It always makes me happy to make something my boys really enjoy!

Be sure to join our Recipe Club to receive a free printable recipe card with my Pumpkin Raisin-Bread Pudding recipe on it. This is a great dish to serve as dessert, but it’s also delicious for brunch!