Christian Monroe Holliday Douglas is a businesswoman, mother, photographer and the author of The South I Knew: Love Letters to My Children, the first of three books in which she combines her storytelling and photographic skills. The other books are Familiar Faces and All God’s Critters.
Christian Monroe Holliday Douglas (second from right) talks with Vice President Joseph Biden during the 2006 Galivants Ferry Stump, one of the subjects in The South I Knew: Love Letters to My Children.
Born on October 18, 1954 in the midst of Hurricane Hazel (interestingly, she was almost named Hazel and has hazel green eyes), Christy grew up in Galivant’s Ferry, SC – the setting for most of the stories in The South I Knew. She is the fourth generation of one of the South’s most prominent families; her grandfather, George Judson Holliday, owned and operated the world’s largest tobacco farm in the 1920s and 1930s.
She attended high school at Ashley Hall School for Girls in Charleston, where she was the President of the Senior Class and Vice President of the Student Council. She moved onto Converse College, where she graduated with a B.A in Art History and minor in French.
In 1982, Christy met her husband, real estate developer David Duvall Douglas. They have three children, Christian Monroe Holliday Douglas (28), Marjorie Russell Holiday Douglas (27), and David Duvall Douglas, Jr. (24). They are the inspiration for The South I Knew: Love Letters to My Children.
During her adult years, Christy has tried her hand at, or presided over, numerous businesses, including Pee Dee Farms Corporation and the family’s Monroe Management, real estate, and remains active at Holliday Associates.
She was also a Communications/ Marketing Vice President of Junior League of Greenville, S.C. where she was a key player in creating a coalition of Junior Leagues in S.C. called “Upstate Junior Leagues”. This led to a First Place National Junior League award for best Public Relations Creativity Media Plan with a PSA for the Upstate Junior Leagues. The PSA was titled “Look Again” to create an awareness of the true mission of Junior Leagues and equality in membership as the Junior Leagues have taken their White Gloves Off. This promoted many to want to join the mostly full timed employed group of women and leaders in their cities.
After Christy, David and their children returned to Galivants Ferry in 1997, Christy became deeply involved in the historic preservation of this small but central place in Southern history and its politics. She became the Head of Public Relations for the Galivants Ferry Stump, at 135+ years’ running the oldest ongoing Democratic Party rally in the nation and a regular stop for regional and national political candidates. She also set out on a mission to preserve Galivants Ferry’s older, historic buildings, in order to maintain the area’s rich history for future generations. Thanks to her efforts, these buildings remain in place and serve as the setting for many of the stories in The South I Knew.
Besides her business and philanthropic work, Christy is quite the collector of hobbies and interests. She re-started and coached the track team at Pee Dee Academy, which had been dropped for years until she revived it. She is a member of the First Presbyterian Church of Florence (SC). She also is a lifelong hunter and fisherman, and enjoys golf, swimming, scuba diving (she has been diving for 30 years with David), yoga, meditation, most forms of exercise, gardening, traveling to exotic natural environments around the world in order to see the familiar faces of real people and cultures and take pictures of all God’s critters. In June, 2012 she and her husband David plan on participating in their third mission trip to the Amazon and they recently returned from their photographic trip to SouthEast Asia. Her love of photography is evident in The South I Knew and Familiar Faces, while her love of animals becomes clear in All God’s Critters.
Now, Christy’s love of storytelling, photography, people, history and the culture of her kin and her forebears come to life for readers and photography fans worldwide in The South I Knew: Love Letters to My Children.