For more than 30 years, the Christmas tree lot next to Lloyd’s Restaurant on hectic U.S. Highway 280 has been a Birmingham holiday tradition.

“I’ve got grandkids of my first customers as customers (now),” says 68-year-old North Carolina tree farmer Bob Daniels, who started selling his Fraser firs in the Lloyd’s lot in 1992. “I’ve got a few that have passed on. I was 36 years old when I first went there.”

The Lloyd’s Tree Lot is like a Hallmark holiday classic come to life, where, amidst all the bumper-to-bumper 280 craziness, the traffic pauses and the Christmas season officially begins.

“To see his big, red, striped tent out there and his workers, it’s kind of like Christmas is around the corner when Bob shows up,” says Mary Stevens Flach, a daughter of the late, longtime Lloyd’s Restaurant owners Eli and Pat Stevens.

But this Christmas will be Daniels’ last in his old, familiar spot.

Lloyd’s Restaurant closed in October 2023 after 86 years in business, and next Christmas, Daniels and his wife, Lisa, and their son, Josh, will move to a new lot less than a mile away on Alabama Highway 119.

RELATED: A Christmas promise never broken

The Lloyd’s Tree Lot reopens this Friday, Nov. 22, at 5301 U.S. Highway 280 and will stay open until Daniels sells out of trees, which is typically around mid-December but sometimes earlier.

That Daniels will be back for one last season at the Lloyd’s lot is something of a Christmas miracle itself.

As he says: “I am blessed that the Lord opened the door for me to be there again this year.”

So, too, is Mary Stevens Flach and her family.

“All of my siblings are excited that Bob is coming back,” she says. “We all love Bob.”

A promise kept

Not long after Daniels began selling his Bobby D’s Christmas Trees in the vacant lot next to Lloyd’s, Eli Stevens promised him he would always have a place to sell his trees for as long as Stevens owned the property.

“I can see the Lord’s hand in this ever since I started,” Daniels says. “You just don’t get a lot with that kind of status and keep it for 33 years. Somebody is going to come along and buy it for a car lot or a shopping mall or something.

“I was allowed to stay there 33 years, and it was all because of Mr. Eli,” he adds. “I think he liked me, and I think he just liked the families coming in.”

Stevens, who used to walk his dogs around the lot and chat with the families while they shopped for their Christmas trees, loved having Daniels there, his daughter says.

“Dad would get so excited when Bob would be there,” Flach says. “He really had a great friendship with Bob.”

Stevens died four years ago – his funeral was the Friday after Thanksgiving, Daniels’ busiest day at the tree lot — but his children honored their father’s promise.

RELATED: Remembering Lloyd’s Restaurant owner Eli Stevens

After the Stevens family decided to close Lloyd’s Restaurant last year, though, a buyer came along to purchase the property and redevelop it, Daniels says.

With the property under contract, Daniels told his longtime customers that he would be moving to a new lot in 2024.

Where he did not yet know.

So, when he packed up last Christmas to head back home to North Carolina, Daniels said his goodbyes to Lloyd’s.

Or so he thought.

“I thought, ‘This is it,’” he recalls. “It was pretty sad when I pulled out. After you go somewhere 33 years, you’ll get attached to it.”

A prayer answered

Earlier this year, Bob and Lisa made the six-and-a-half-hour drive to Birmingham from their home in Newland – in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains — to scout out for a new tree lot.

“We spent maybe two or three days down there, and we came home with nothing solid,” Daniels says. “We had a lot of leads, but we didn’t have anything solid.”

After they got home that night, though, Daniels received a text message from one of his regular customers, pediatric dentist Jeff Flannery, whose family has been buying their Christmas trees at the Lloyd’s lot for the past 10 years.

“We love Christmas, and we always go to his lot and try to find one of the biggest Christmas trees, prettiest Christmas trees on the lot,” Flannery says. “I’ve got six kids, and it’s just become a family tradition.”

Flannery’s Oak Mountain Pediatric Dentistry is on Alabama Highway 119, less than a mile from the Lloyd’s lot, and he told Daniels he had a couple of acres of land next to his office that might make the perfect spot for his tree lot.

“I just told him, I was like, everybody loves you guys, and we want you guys to stay close,” Flannery recalls. “I talked to a lot of people about it, and everyone I talked to was like, ‘Yeah, we want them to stay in this area.’”

They worked out an agreement, and earlier this year, Daniels put up a sign next to Oak Mountain Pediatric Dentistry to let his customers know that is where he would be moving, and he shared the news on Facebook.

Then, because of the extended drought that has parched most of Alabama, the grass in the new tree lot was slow to take root, Flannery says, and Daniels began to worry if it would be ready in time for him to open this year.

So he called Mary Stevens Flach – who, Daniels says, “has been a very good friend to me” — to ask her a favor.

“When he drove by and saw that nothing was going on at Lloyd’s, he wanted to know if there was any way that he could come back and be on that lot this year,” Flach says. “And my first response was, ‘Absolutely.’”

It was not only an answered prayer for Daniels but also a blessing to Flach and her family, she says.

“It’s been really hard watching my dad’s business close,” she says. “When I think about my dad’s restaurant, I can still taste his lemon pie, I can still smell the fried chicken.

“So when Bob called, it just gave me a good feeling to have something familiar go on that lot,” she adds. “I don’t know how else to say it, other than it was a God wink.”

A new Christmas memory

But this Christmas really is it for Daniels at his old spot.

The Lloyd’s Restaurant property is again under contract, Flach says, and will likely be sold by the end of the year.

She and her husband, Pete Flach, who owns Hamburger Heaven next to the Lloyd’s Tree Lot, plan to go with their oldest son, Philip, and their daughter-in-law, Shelby, when they take their 2-year-old granddaughter Scottie to pick out their family Christmas tree.

“It will be cool that they get to take her because she will really understand Christmas this year,” Flach says. “So it will be really cool to go down and get our Christmas tree from Bob.”

Flach thinks it all could make a heartwarming Hallmark movie one day. She already has the title: “The Christmas Tree Lot.”

“Bob could probably tell so many stories,” she says, “and to me, it has that magic of Christmas.”

The Lloyd’s Tree Lot is at 5301 U.S. Highway 280. Hours are 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays and 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Sundays. Trees are typically available until mid-December.