AKRON, Ohio — One year after Emily and Jeremiah Harding bought a 1911 brick colonial on Merriman Road that had sat on the market for nearly a year, the family is opening its doors to hundreds of strangers for a good cause: the house is one of five stops on the 25th annual Sugar Plum Tour, the signature fundraiser of the Gay Community Endowment Fund of the Akron Community Foundation, The Buckeye Flame reported on November 10.
The tour returns Sunday, December 6, from noon to 5 p.m., and a single ticket covers all five homes, with virtual tour tickets also available, according to The Buckeye Flame. Proceeds fund programs that benefit the LGBTQ+ community and Greater Akron as a whole.
The Hardings’ story is the kind the tour was built on. Emily Harding, the third-generation owner of Adolph Optical in Highland Square, wanted to be in Akron and settled before one of the couple’s four children started high school, she told The Buckeye Flame. Touring the five-bedroom, four-bathroom colonial, she turned to Jeremiah and said a single code word — “umbrella” — their private signal that a home would protect the family.
“That was our code word that meant that the home was going to protect us,” Emily Harding told The Buckeye Flame. Jeremiah Harding told the outlet he understood the moment he turned on a first-floor bathroom faucet and watched the water flow into the white porcelain sink. “Moving into this house, the first thing I said was, ‘Okay, we’re gonna be a stop on the Sugar Plum Tour,’ so this is a dream come true,” Emily Harding told The Buckeye Flame.
The 3,800-square-foot house, built in 1911, mixes Georgian revival and craftsman details — marble thresholds and bifold doors among them — that the family describes as lovingly restored, The Buckeye Flame reported. This will be only the family’s second Christmas in the home; the first came soon after the death of Emily’s grandmother, known as Baba, whose holiday decorations, collected over a lifetime, now fill what the family calls “Baba’s pantry,” including 40 brass candlesticks from Colonial Williamsburg that will line the Christmas mantle, according to The Buckeye Flame.
“Christmas was Baba’s jam and she definitely made it my jam,” Emily Harding told The Buckeye Flame. “I wish she could be here to see it.” When the family’s tour application was accepted, the children started an assembly line to carry decorations up from the basement — and then, Jeremiah Harding told the outlet, the family mostly got out of Emily’s way, with one veto: no Clydesdales pulling a yule log in the front yard.
The Sugar Plum Tour has been an Akron holiday fixture for a quarter century, and its model — neighbors opening decorated homes so a community fund can grant money back into the region — is the same spirit behind other efforts NewsForce247 has covered this season, from veterans honoring a former congressman at Akron’s Glendale Cemetery to Fremont neighbors raising money to replant memorial trees for veterans.
Emily Harding told The Buckeye Flame the house will stay “very classic,” with different themes in different rooms. “I want to keep it as elegant as possible without going completely over the top,” she told the outlet. “We want people to feel warm and welcomed and leave with joy.”
The Gay Community Endowment Fund, housed at the Akron Community Foundation, uses tour proceeds for grantmaking that supports programs across Greater Akron. Home tours like this one raise money precisely because they offer something a gala cannot: a walk through a real family’s rooms, at the moment of the year when homes carry the most meaning. For the Hardings, that meaning is doubled — the tour is both a fundraiser and a tribute to the grandmother whose decorations fill the house.
Twenty-five years in, the tour’s staying power says something about Akron itself: a city where a fundraiser works because people will open their front doors. The five homes on this year’s route each carry a family’s story, and the ticket in a visitor’s hand turns those stories into grants that return to the community long after the garlands come down in January.
What happens next is simple and close: tickets for the December 6 tour, in person and virtual, are on sale through the Sugar Plum Tour’s website, and the five homes open at noon that Sunday. Families looking for more of the season’s giving spirit can also read about a Findlay family receiving a Habitat home built with 250 volunteers.