PASS-A-GRILLE BEACH, Fla. — As we get ready to ring in the new year, there are a lot of celebrations not happening this year.

After all the damage to homes and businesses in the Bay Area, we wanted to see if some of those traditional celebrations were still happening.

So are beach communities still hosting their annual celebrations? On Pass-a-Grille beach, they are.

When it comes to a New Year’s Eve celebration, there’s an art to it. It’s why Susan Cameron said she got well-known artist, Rasta Geary Taylor, to help ring it in the right way. Painting murals, windows and anything his paint brush landed on.

Once you get past the creative collection at her art gallery and shop, it was a straight path to the main event of the night, the ball.

“So, this is the ball which you can see had a little bit of salt water on it,” Cameron said. “It was actually on the ground floor, so it got a little bit of water on it, you know, from the storm. But the lights still work, and everything still goes.”

Besides getting caught up in the storm surge from hurricane Helene that flooded this building, this ball has history.

“I found a ball on Amazon, one of those big exercise balls and we covered it with silver tape and then we put lights on it. And then another guy says we got a ball on second avenue, maybe y’all should use it. So, we lit it up and I think it was a chandelier somewhere,” Cameron said.

This New Year’s Eve, on the side of the Evander Preston building, it’s serving as a beacon of hope for so many. Just as it has in years past. And a reminder of better days ahead.