Mount Holly Lantern Day Parade

Lantern Parade

With all the drama surrounding the theft of my rental car (and there are zero updates there), I forgot to post about my community's entry in the 7th Annual Mount Holly Lantern Day Parade. This was the fourth year that Imagery has entered the parade (our community was only formed in 2019).

The theme was "The Fantastical World of Flight", and the options of what to build were endless. Our design team takes into account the fact that we have many people in the neighborhood who, while they may never help in the building process, want to walk with us in the parade. So obviously we would not choose to build one large lantern, like Dumbo for example. We like to have a number of lanterns in our entry. The second consideration is that we want to appeal to the kids, as there are many of them along the parade route. For those reasons we decided to go with Santa and his reindeer.

We constructed a six foot long sleigh for Santa, and built his nine reindeer, each of whom was five feet long. We added ten twelve inch square gift boxes, four lollipops and four candy canes. All of these were constructed of wire, lit with fairy lights, then covered with two layers of tissue paper. We also have a lit banner with our name - Imagery - in from of our entry. We had 32 people in our unit, including two of our own parade marshalls to keep people in line and five of the Singing Elves from our community. 

We had requested to be last in the parade, and our wish was granted. What better way to end any parade than with Santa? We were greeted with many claps and cheers, as well as spontaneous renditions of "Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer" along the parade route. And we won First Place in the "Group" category for the fourth year in a row! 

Imagery Lantern Parade entry

Next year's theme is "Into the Deep Blue Sea". We have our thinking caps on...