Christmas Parade set for Tuesday
Homewood Christmas Parade
Tuesday, Dec. 9
6:30 p.m.
Downtown Homewood
A living nativity glides down 18th Street each December.
A generator provides light for the Bethlehem cityscape, manger and plywood camel. Last year, the music wouldn’t work right, so the children playing the nativity characters sang “Away in a Manger” as they processed in front of the library, down 18th Street and over to SoHo.
Older elementary students from Our Lady of Sorrows Catholic School play Mary and Joseph while younger students dress as angels, camels, lambs, donkeys and cows — about 50 students in all. Three wise men walk behind while junior high students walk along next to the float to pass out candy canes.
“It becomes such a huge production,” said Wendy Spratley, an OLS parent who has headed up the float for the past four years. “We want to keep it in the sense of the true poverty of the original nativity, but it’s hard to do. We dressed up a little girl as the north star one year, and we said, ‘That’s the best use of light.’”
Four years ago, the Homewood Christmas Parade moved from Saturday morning to a weekday evening. This year it is scheduled for Tuesday, Dec. 9.
“It became a night parade, and I thought I was in Mardi Gras all of a sudden,” Spratley said. “It is huge.”
When the Christmas parade was held during the day, things were simpler, Spratley said. Kids sat on hay on a trailer, and they had a Mary and Joseph. Spratley noted that they haven’t won a float prize since the first year of the night parade, but their focus remains on the nativity.
Joe Falconer, a real estate agent who throws moon pies from his float each year, gets excited talking about the parade’s nighttime transformation.
“To be able to see the lights and not as much the people [like in the daytime parade] on the trailers is absolutely beautiful,” he said.
He said he just has three strings of lights, but his fellow members of the West Homewood Lions Club aim to be the trailer with the most lights.
“Those guys are always in the spirit,” he said, noting that the parade’s centerpiece remains the Homewood High School band.
Cub Scouts in Pack 397 capture a similar spirit. Each fall, the Trinity United Methodist pack members start asking about riding in a 35-foot-long sleigh for the parade.
“As much as they enjoy camping and all the things we do, simple things like riding on a float get them the most excited,” Scoutmaster Mark Boackle said.
Parents spend two weekends reconstructing the sleigh in a warehouse, and the Scouts paint it, create decorations, help run wires for lights and hang wreaths.
“Kids like the lights, but they really want to ride, throw beads and wave,” Boackle said.
About 60 Scouts can fit in the sleigh. The younger ones sit in the front, and as they get older, they sit on the ramps toward the back.
“The greatest joy as they get older is getting to be almost eye to eye with the traffic lights,” Boackle said.