Confessions of a Parade Geek

There are a lot of things that are great about living in a small town. But at the top of the list has got to be the parades.

Where I came from being in a parade was as attainable as getting nominated for a Nobel Prize.

I’d watch parade after parade every year, wondering if I’d ever get to march down a street carrying an instrument, or sit regally while waving from the back of a colored tissue filled trailer.

Oh, to be a waver instead of a wavee.

In the big city access to parade participation seems be largely based on some sort of secretive panel of elders who select individual floats based on the same logic that applies to lottery winners. The announcers would talk about the participants as if they had completed perfect SATs, rolled boulders up hill for days, and endured a grilling before a congressional subcommittee just to get an application.

But that didn’t keep me from dreaming. I became a parade geek, watching countless parades on TV, dashing out to the big ones even though it involved camping on the street for four hours beforehand. No kidding.

Fortunately I moved. And I found parade heaven.

In a small town, everybody can be in a parade. No kidding. EVERYBODY.

In fact, pretty much all you have to do is agree to show up. I mean it’s really sort of incredible that anyone is even left on the sidelines.

In our small town you don’t have to have pull in the mayor’s office or belong to some big company. You can just be… well… a parade geek. You don’t have to represent any one particularly important.

In fact, one year we were in the 4th of July parade representing our street -- which is only two blocks long.

That year we inexplicably won first place. I suspect the fact that we had dogs on our float and one of the judges was our local veterinarian helped.

This year both girls were in the Christmas parade on separate floats, one as an elf, the other as a Who from Whoville. Even our dog was in the parade, wearing a single deer antler on his head.

I walked between the floats trying to ensure no one got run over while we sped along at 5 miles an hour.

More importantly, we were all wavers. Even Dyno:

Swinging into Christmas...

 Boxes of Christmas

(this is a coffee filter angel created by mixed media artist, Mireya)


They say Christmas doesn’t come in a package.

That’s because they’ve never been in our attic.

In our attic is a really large amount of Christmas. Not all of it, and definitely not the most important part, but let me tell you, we get pretty close.

By Sunday we had recovered enough from the turkey haze to bring out 2 of the 523 boxes of Christmas from the attic.  One was the after-Christmas-sale unassembled  (sorry Daddy) reindeer and the box containing, among other things, the all important advent calendar.

Almost immediately the negotiations started.

“I’ll take this day, then you can have the next, then it’ll be my turn,” said Sierra, moving the giant wooden snowflake among the mittens.

Mireya, alert to being taken for a ride by her older sister, counted through and noticed she might not be the snowflake holder on Christmas Eve. “How about I take this day and you take that day…”

Full of Christmas spirit (and a realization that sisters get considerably smarter when they hit 6), Sierra suggested they BOTH move the snowflake on Christmas Eve, regardless of “turn.”

Further down in the box were the mismatched Christmas villages. Buildings right out of It’s a Wonderful Life mixed in with houses from some long abandoned train set. Little dogs were placed close to their fire hydrant and a giant snowman strolled the street, looking for iced latte. Santa was perched on top of a tiny house like one of those huge inflatable pink gorillas they use at car lots.

By the end, the top of our piano was transformed into a sort of Gulliver’s Travels meets A Christmas Carole with a little Vegas style lighting.

Only one hand painted wreath was in the box, which means the rest of the real Christmas treasures are somewhere in the other 521 boxes. The snow scene made of salt on black paper, the Santa with the cotton ball beard, and the reindeer with antlers made of handprints and a bright red pom pom nose—they are somewhere in there, waiting to make time turn on its head and bring eleven years of Christmases back to life.

Yes, a good bit of our Christmas is in those boxes. And I look forward to hauling out every last bit.

 

Wreath Rivalry
It was wreath only a mother could love.

It started with the show "100 holiday ideas for a total of $100." Beautifully dressed interior designers frolicked through their demonstrations of ideas that often required a master's degree in glue guns. But then a man in a black turtleneck with a meticulously developed air of bored superiority showed how to make a wreath with drycleaner bags. By tying shredded strips of the plastic bags around a disassembled coat hanger, you could create a shiny, ecologically friendly wreath.

Since motherhood cut down on my dry cleaning (by staining every outfit I had that required dry cleaning) I substituted grocery bags and started cutting and tying strips. A few hours later, I was astonished. Hey, I thought, this looks pretty good.

This is what cable does to you. You actually come to believe that plastic bags tied around a coat hanger "looks pretty good."

I even decided to give it to my mother. When I delivered it early in December, it was fourth grade all over again. She loved it, and promptly displayed it on the mantle. I was a little embarrassed, but also ridiculously proud.

We returned to her house for the big holiday dinner weeks later. On her mantle was a huge wreath. It was gorgeous, the greenery absolutely perfect, the colors flowing in a holiday harmony that would have silenced any decent choir. Martha Stewart would have given her left tit for this wreath.

And there, on the little music stand next to the mantle, was my recycled bag wreath.

"Oh! Did you see the wreath Christy sent me?" my mother said.

Of course. My sister. From across the Midwest she had reached into the open-ended game of sibling rivalry black jack and tossed down a big, fat ace right here, in my mother's house.

I turned to look at my mother, to apologize for my sad little homemade wreath. But one look at her brought me up short. She had no idea of the vast gulf that lay between my wreath with the ripped grocery bags and the Epic Salute to the Spirits of Yuletide on the mantle. In her eyes, they were somehow THE SAME.

I was floored. First, I realized I'd have no chance to ditch my plastic ring of economy Christmas in the closet, sparing myself the inevitable comparisons that would race across the faces of every relative present. Then, it dawned on me.

My mother is incredible.

In her heart and in her eyes, they were from her daughters. They were our love shaped into circles and she cherished them both.

Already I find this beautiful blindness within myself. I see gifts given from the heart of my children are the same, despite all appearances to the contrary.

As a daughter, I'm still completely mortified by the memory of the wreath rivalry where I was so completely left in the dust. Yet I take considerable comfort in knowing that to my mother there was no contest—and there never has been.