CKW #3 - Lexington Christmas Parade

This is post #3 in our Christmas Kickoff Week. See below for posts about buying a Christmas tree and our first snow.

On Saturday night we went to see the Lexington Christmas Parade. Now before I get into my feelings about the parade, let me say that the Christmas decorations in our cute little historic town are awesome! All of the historic streetlamps have wreaths and lights on them. The town square is fully decorated, too. Pictures don't do it justice, but here is a taste of it (these were taken a few days before the parade).

We expected the parade to be rather small and quick, ending with Santa Clause on a fire engine. Boy were we WRONG! For some reason, the good leaders of Lexington thought it would be a good idea to have a 2-hour long parade starting at 5:30 PM (which means it was dark) on the coldest night we have had thus far.

Evidently the qualifications to be in the parade are merely desire. If you were a company from anywhere within our county or the neighboring 4 counties, you were invited to be in the parade. It didn't matter if nobody in the world had any interest in seeing your group in a parade. If you were any group affiliated with children or animals you were invited to be there. And best of all, anybody that owns a vehicle with more than 4 wheels is required to enter such vehicle in the parade.

The parade started with more than 20 fire trucks going by, which was cool at first, but they were driving very slow with their sirens blaring, so it was a bit of overkill. Then, came the city maintenance vehicles, dumptrucks, earthmovers, electric company trucks, cable company trucks, local construction company duellies, the Lexington quarry's trucks, and waste management trucks. After nearly thirty minutes of nearly asphyxiating from the exhaust, we sat and waited for 10 minutes for the rest of the parade.

Now why was there such a large gap? Because every group that was not a firetruck/dumptruck/electric company truck/etc stopped in front of the dignitaries who were sitting in their warm seats on the hotel. So, if you sat after them (like us) there was a HUGE gap between each group.

This means the parade lasted nearly as long as any of the half dozen Rose Parades I have attended... over 2 hours. There were at least 4 Boy Scout troops, 3 girl scout troops, 5 elementary school, two Jingle for Jesus groups, and more than a dozen queens and princesses from the county fair, the local beauty pageants, 4-H clubs, and even the high school queen. (I had no idea there were so many pageants in our little town.) On top of that were all the performing groups... and don't flatter these groups by picturing anything near the quality of Kids Are Music. Let's just say that the most memorable were the Roanoke (40 miles away) Cloggers... who were all at least 40 years old.

Pretty much there was nothing memorable in the parade. But we had told Leland we were going to see Santa and she was loving every single minute in anticipation. So we stayed through it all. The only problem was that after over an hour Leland says, "I need to go potty Mom." So we raced through the crowd to the open coffee shop.

The one cool thing was the boys from Virginia Military Institute (the other university in Lexington) marched in formation. Check out the video below and you will see that was pretty cool.

Anyway, now we can say we have done it. But it is not something we will do next year.