Pickles, possums and pests among icons used to celebrate New Year's around NC 

Who really wants to watch a ball drop, after all?

Everybody's familiar with the Times Square New Year's celebration. It's become the token American New Year's Eve party for decades, thanks to Dick Clark and now Ryan Seacrest.

But North Carolinians march to the beat their own strangeness. Here in Charlotte, we do not drop a ball but instead raise a bright Queen City crown logo in Uptown.

While that's not strange in itsef, and actually pretty cool, I researched how some small towns around America think outside the ball to ring in the new year and found that our great state plays home to some of the most-oddball New Year's celebrations around.

The three following events show the different ways (to say the least) people across the state will drop into 2016.

Clay's Corner Possum Drop

Clay's Corner is a small convenience store in Brasstown, which sits near the westernmost corner of North Carolina, on the border of Georgia and just a matter of miles from Tennessee.

The store opened in the mid-'40s and has been under the ownership of Clay Logan for 27 years. In that time, Logan has declared through his own unofficial research that Brasstown is the Opossum Capital of the World, and 21 years ago he decided to celebrate that fact with an old-fashioned (OK, maybe never done before) New Year's Eve Possum Drop.

In most of the first 20 celebrations – when looming lawsuits didn't damper the fun – organizers have placed a living possum in a decorated plastic box and lowered it to correlate with the countdown to the new year.

Logan wanted to create an event where families could come and have fun with the community. It's become a tourist attraction for the small town, attracting anywhere from 2,000 to 3,000 visitors depending on the weather. It's a strictly alcohol-free event.

"We advertise it as the only New Year's party you can go to and remember what you done the next day regardless of how much fun you had," Logan says.

The good ol' boys of Brasstown and their possum-hunting dogs find each year's catch in the days leading up to New Year's Eve, which has been one of the reasons the event has caught the attention of activists.

The Possum Drop has found its way to the headlines in recent years as a lawsuit from the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) forced organizers to discontinue use of a live animal during the proceedings.

This year, however, the live possum will be back. Logan's even selling "Zone of Lawlessness" shirts at the event. The motto comes from an expression used during the most recent lawsuit from PETA, which challenged a proposed Wake County law that would suspend opossum-related wildlife regulations in Clay County between Dec. 26 and Jan. 2 each year, effectively acting as a protection for the Possum Drop and creating what PETA's lawyers called a "zone of lawlessness" that could allow organizers to waterboard or crucify opossums (PETA's ideas, not ours).

Logan scoffs at allegations that he would torture the possum, claiming he keeps it safer than it would be in the wild where most get hit by cars. The possum is let loose following the event, he said.

"This is the best looked-after possum around. It gets fed and looked after and it's not out on the side of the road," Logan says. "I treat this possum better than I treat my wife and I treat her awful good."

Depositions from three lawsuits regarding the Possum Drop show a colorful history between PETA and Logan; in one he admits that he has used dead, stuffed possums to trick onlooking PETA observers, even placing a remote-control car under one while it sat in a box to make it look alive.

That's not the only silliness to be found at the Possum Drop. The annual Miss Possum Contest is the main attraction. Male contestants dress up in ladies' attire and get on stage asking for votes. The winner makes appearances year-round at other community events in her get-up.

But whatever you do while in Clay County, don't call it a drag show.

"These are southern gentleman dressed as southern ladies," Logan specified. "These are not men in drag."

Sure, Clay, whatever you say.

The Eastover Flea Drop

The town of Eastover in Buncombe County was only incorporated as such in 2007, but Eastover Township has been around since 1923 and, before that, it was referred to as Flea Hill since the early 19th Century.

The sandy conditions and Carolina climate mixed to create a perfect habitat for fleas and the name stuck, or rather, it latched on and began to feed. Dogs and cats in Flea Hill roamed free throughout the town and often slept under the local church, infesting the entire building with fleas. The congregation suffered through Sundays, and there are multiple recollections of the pastor holding his Bible in one hand and scratching feverishly with the other.

"People would go to the church on Sunday and they'd have an itchin' good time," Eastover Mayor Charles McLaurin says. "It was a horrible experience."

According to local legend, a band of gypsies passed through and set up camp next to the church. The camp quickly became infested, but the nomadic visitors knew how to fight back. They placed black walnut leaves throughout their tents to fend off the jumping invaders, and it worked. The floor of the church was soon thereafter covered with the leaves, which reportedly brought some relief, but the pests remained a problem throughout town well into the 1950s, infesting a local tavern and keeping the regulars itching and scratching.

• A 30-pound flea, which sounds like the thing of nightmares, is dropped on Flea Hill each year in Eastover to celebrate New Year’s. (Photo courtesy of The Town of Eastover)

About 100 years since the gypsies passed through, Eastover no longer has a flea problem, but an actual hill and nearby stormwater drainage district keep the Flea Hill name alive.

Come New Year's Eve each year, town members rally around a pole on Flea Hill and watch a three-foot-long, 30-pound flea drop to the ground to mark the final countdown of the year.

The town has hosted the Flea Drop since 2007. Mayor Charles McLaurin was looking for ways to bring the community together while celebrating its history. He and a local resident named Judy constructed the large flea — later named Jasper the Flea in a contest among community members — out of foam, fabric, wire and wood.

"It gives us a little insight into our history and it also showed the changes we've been through," McLaurin says. "It's just something that we can bring forward to add a little humor to New Year's."

The Mt. Olive Pickle Drop

A glowing, three-foot-long pickle making its way down a rope is just something you have to see for yourself to understand.

This tradition arrived in Mount Olive, North Carolina, in 1999 in the lead up to Y2K. The local Mt. Olive Pickle Company was named "the official pickle and pepper of the millennium" by whatever governing body names such things, and a few Mt. Olive officials decided to lower a pickle from a rope on New Year's Eve as a symbol.

Eight people showed up that night at 7 p.m., including the Mt. Olive maintenance supervisor, then-president Johnny Walker and Mt. Olive spokesperson Lynn Williams and her children. The pickle was lowered to some laughs and not much fanfare.

The next year was the company's 75th anniversary, and Walker sent out an open invitation for employees to attend. About 50 people showed up and got a good laugh out of it.

"By the third year we figured out we were on to something," Williams said. "We did a public event and 250 people showed up in the dark to watch a pickle come down. Now, it has taken on a life of its own."

• Thousands of people gather each year to watch a three-foot glowing pickle drop early in the evening on New Year’s Eve before moving along to other, more acceptable celebrations. (Photo Courtesy of Mt. Olive Pickle Company)

The Mt. Olive Pickle Drop now attracts around 3,000 people each year. Free pickles, cookies and hot chocolate are offered up while live music plays, but the quickness of the event is perhaps its best feature. As the website says, "Everything's over by 7:05."

Williams said the timing, which coincides with midnight GMT (they celebrate with Ireland, Greenland and northwestern Africa), is the main selling point for families who need to get their kids in bed or party-goers with other plans later in the night.

"One thing about the pickle drop is that it's early and it's short. We have tons of families that come and older folks that don't want to stay out that late, and it's a really nice event," she says.

The Mt. Olive Pickle plant in Mount Olive employs about 4,500 people, only a few hundred less than the town's population. You'd be hard-pressed to find anyone without kin working in the factory, Williams said.

All the more reason the town comes together on New Year's to look out for each other and those in surrounding areas. Cash and food donations, usually about a half-ton, are donated to the Food Bank of Central and Eastern North Carolina.

"We think the whole think is just a hoot," Williams said.