Perry County Heritage Tourism is offering a historic and sometimes spiritual journey as sort of a kickoff to the Christmas season with its 17th annual Christmas Country Church Tour.
The church tour begins on Thursday, Dec. 15 and continues Friday, Dec. 16 from 2-9 p.m. on both nights. The event is a self-guided driving tour that allows participants the chance to visit rural churches decked out in Christmas decorations.
“I love this event because every year it seems like more and more people from farther away come to visit and take part in this,” Heritage Tourism Director Trish Erzfeld said. “It’s a really good feeling to see people enjoy it like they do, especially around the Christmas season. They enjoy the architecture, the traditions and really enjoy talking to the people of the community.”
The 38 churches which make up this year’s tour are spread out among Ste. Genevieve, Bollinger, Perry, Cape Girardeau counties as well as Kaskaskia, Ill. That number is up from 32 churches that participated in 2021.
Each one of the churches on the tour have a great deal of history that visitors are often interested in. All but three churches on the tour are 100 years old, and several are 175 years or older and three that have reached the 200-year plateau. Erzfeld noted that those anniversaries are for the buildings and not the congregations.
Some of them have been key in bringing certain denominations and traditions to the region. For example, St. Mary’s of the Barrens Catholic Church Association of the Miraculous Medal was the first seminary west of the Mississippi River, the Lutheran Heritage Center and Log Cabin College in Altenburg led to the birth of Lutheran Church— Missouri Synod, and the Old McKendree Chapel in Jackson was the first Protestant church to be established west of the Mississippi River.