87 Things to Love About Alabama: The MoonPie over Mobile

For a little over a decade, the city of Mobile, Alabama has been dropping a mini-van sized MoonPie logo (not an actual MoonPie, much to my dismay) down the side of the 34-story RSA tower as the clock strikes midnight on New Year’s Eve.

Over 50,000 people will crowd into streets and squares in downtown Mobile to listen to live concerts, socialize, watch parades, and see the actual world’s largest MoonPie (over 150 pounds) get cut up and consumed in the Renaissance Hotel plaza.

Though Chattanooga is the origination of the MoonPie, Mobile has long housed a distribution center that is known for taking many of Chattanooga’s experimental flavors and testing the market with them. In the 60s, the MoonPies started becoming thrown staples in the multi-week marathon of parades that is Mardis Gras because the previous fan favorite— boxes of Cracker Jacks— were causing too many injuries when flung from the back of a float. Eventually, some city officials decided to combine the two ideas, and it has quickly become a unique and quirky tradition.