The best holiday traditions, bound up as they are with family, are a little bit weird. There’s a reason we cozy up to films about leg lamps, nativity lobsters, and dotty old aunts wrapping up cats come December. In their absurdity we see ourselves.
Case in point: For nearly seventy years Atlantans have celebrated the season by climbing into a miniature monorail shaped like a pink pig, called the Pink Pig. The ride debuted in 1956 at the Rich’s on Broad Street, a grand old department store whose existence is hard to fathom in the age of post-pandemic ghost downtowns. But in the shop’s midcentury heyday, pint-size passengers would cram into grinning, bubblegum-pink metal tubes for a joyride along the ceiling of the toy department. By the 1960s the attraction encompassed a pair of porkers (eventually named Priscilla and Percival) and had moved onto the roof for a better view of the Great Tree, which presided over the store’s glass-enclosed footbridge.
Wherefore a pig? The monorail originally opened as the Snowball Express, rebranding every year until 1959, when, according to local lore, a headlight fell off and executives saw fit to replace it with a snout—one that would burrow into the hearts of generations of Southerners.
“Rich’s really put on a display back in the fifties and sixties,” says Paul Crater, vice president of collections and research at the Atlanta History Center. “People would come from outside of Atlanta and do the whole thing—get the ‘I Rode the Pink Pig’ sticker, sit on Santa’s lap. People would get dressed up and have lunch in the Magnolia Room, which was a really fancy place to eat. It was a highly anticipated event for a lot of people.”
It could also be slightly terrifying. Jim Auchmutey, a longtime reporter with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, recalled his own childhood encounter with the Pink Pig in a 2003 article: “Instead of windows, it has undersize openings covered with steel mesh that resemble something on the back of a paddy wagon. Sure, it was fun zipping around the ceiling of toyland in a flying pig, but if you were prone to claustrophobia like I was, it could feel like a juvenile lockup.”
For better and worse, the oddball attraction evolved over the years, proving itself a miracle of longevity in a city disposed to bulldozing its past. After the downtown Rich’s closed in 1991, the railcars moved to the Egleston’s Children’s Hospital Festival of Trees, where they chugged along for a few years before being donated to the Atlanta History Center. (The museum stopped traffic on West Paces Ferry Road to wheel them inside.) Then, in 2003, the Rich’s at Lenox Square mall debuted a decidedly non-thrilling but blessedly non-enclosed reboot, which journeyed through festive vignettes under a parking lot tent. The sensory impact of Priscilla 2.0 came from her over-the-top Southern accent as she narrated the trip and, well, the pinkness of it all.
Still, a new generation of Atlantans dutifully climbed aboard, and many residents were crushed when Macy’s, which by then had absorbed the Rich’s nameplate, announced the indefinite closure of the ride in 2021. Priscilla herself issued a statement: “I treasure the friends I’ve met from near and far and am proud of the iconic holiday tradition I’ve become.” (A year later, the Lenox Macy’s would install its last rooftop tree, another inherited tradition from the downtown Rich’s.)
Those same residents were equally thrilled earlier this year, when the Georgia Festival of Trees announced it had reached an agreement with Macy’s to resurrect the ride. “People asked me over and over again to bring back the Pink Pig, and of course it took me a while to fully understand its significance,” says the festival’s executive director, Angie Ulibarri, who’d moved to Atlanta in 2016. “As a bit of a people pleaser, I really hated always telling people no.”
The Festival of Trees has its own long, temporarily derailed history in the city. For more than thirty years it was a signature fundraiser for Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, before shuttering in 2009. Seeing the void it left, Ulibarri set to work creating a similar event with fresh beneficiaries: Street Grace and Atlanta Redemption Ink, nonprofits working to combat human trafficking and support survivors. The new festival debuted three years ago and opens this weekend at Gas South Convention Center in Duluth, where it will pair copious twinkle-lit trees with live performances and children’s activities galore, including, of course, the Pink Pig.
Make that two Pink Pigs—Penny and Porter, twin trackless trolleys that will cruise around the festival floor. They oink and light up and emit steam, and there’s no way around it, folks—they don’t quite feel the same. How could they, given the ride’s high-flying beginnings at a downtown retail palace? It feels a little like when the Atlanta Ballet’s Nutcracker left the historic Fox Theatre after a quarter century. The Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre is nice, but it doesn’t have a ceiling full of stars.
But so go holiday traditions. We cling, they change. While Penny and Porter may not have the same retro appeal as, say, the gnomes at Rock City or It’s a Small World at Disney World, they show an admirable reverence for their grandparents in their recitation of Pink Pig history. (Yes, they still have Southern accents.) And it’s certainly hard to argue for the return of death-trap Peppa—though if you really want to see her, head to the atrium of the Atlanta History Center, which displays the seventies-era cars during the holidays.
Most importantly, though, the new Pink Pig is pink, and it is a pig. And in that sense it’s bound to elicit the same mixture of smiles and blank expressions it always has—expressions that seem to ask, What is this thing? and, How did I get here? In truth, it’s been a long time since Atlantans rode the Pink Pig for the thrill or even, really, for the holiday magic. No, we ride the Pink Pig because it’s tradition—a wonderfully weird tradition that belongs to our six-million-strong family of weirdos. And this weekend, when the smallest among us sprint past Santa Claus to board an oinking, squealing, smiling choo choo the color of Pepto Bismol, all will feel, if only for a moment, exactly as it should.
The Georgia Festival of Trees runs from November 23 through December 1 (closed November 27–28). Get tickets to the Pink Pig here.
