America loves a parade.
From tiny towns and suburbs, with their decorated Fourth of July wagons and pets, to the giant balloons of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York to the spectacular creations of the Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena, Calif., this morning.
More than 35 million people likely will watch all or part of the event, if past records are any indication. That's more people than the finale of "American Idol" gets sometimes, and maybe more than the Rose Bowl game itself will attract.
The parade can be seen in more than 150 countries. It should look spectacular in HD, but if you want it without a lot of commercials, check out HGTV.
It might be good if some channel had an announcer-less version so you wouldn't have to listen to all the often-mindless chatter between the co-hosts. They could just tell viewers which band or float was on screen at any given moment. Of course, you could just mute the sound, but then you'd miss the bands. They never let you hear enough of the bands anyway.
Not everyone will tune in for the full treatment. Many will just dip in and out of it, but some folks will stay for the whole show, and there's nothing quite like it.
It's always hard to believe that everything covering all those gigantic floats is composed of flowers or natural materials (such as leaves or sometimes bark), but the rules are strict.
In the very beginning, way back in 1890, the parade was just a local thing, staged on New Year's Day to entertain the townspeople and perhaps get some newspaper coverage back East, where the winter winds were howling and cities were being buried in snow. The gloating factor was big -- and it is still.
The original parade consisted of people putting flowers on their horse-drawn carriages and cruising down the main drag -- but never on Sunday: The town fathers were afraid that such doings on a church day might disrupt services and spook the horses tied up along the route.
Nowadays, they don't have it on Sundays because they don't want to compete with anything the National Football League might schedule. Remember to keep sacred the pigskin day.
In 1890, parade-goers retired to a nearby park and held footraces and tug-of-war contests -- and probably brought along a picnic lunch.
Motorized carriages came along about 1900. Now, more than a century later, the whole thing is motorized, computerized and super-sized.
Many of the floats are built by firms that specialize in such colossal concoctions for a large price that a big-name sponsor pays.
According to reports, some of the Tournament of Roses' floats are still built by volunteers putting in as many as 65,000 hours. And the results are breathtaking.
It's hard to imagine that they can design and create such things. Some of the work is done over a year's period with people who begin planning the day after the parade.
The flowers are placed in pods and sometimes in individual vials of water in the week between Christmas and New Year's Day, with most being inserted two to three days ahead of time. It's all done by hand, one flower at a time, using thousands of blossoms for each float. Some of them can cost up to $ 1 million, not counting volunteer labor.
The parade travels a 5.5-mile route, and it would take 2.5 hours for the whole parade to pass by if you were standing in one place -- or were lucky enough to have a bleacher seat.
One of the most remarkable things about the long history of the parade is that it almost never rains in California on New Year's Day. There was a streak of more than a half-century without significant precipitation -- until 2006, when it poured on the parade and practically turned it into a sorry, soggy mess. But 50-1 odds are pretty good.
If you were in Los Angeles, you could go by and see all the floats up close in a park for a couple of days after the parade.
Anyway, doing a little California dreaming and seeing all those flowers on such a winter's day back here is a pleasant way to welcome in the new year.
http://www.courier-journal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080101/COLUMNISTS15/801010360/1011/SCENE
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