Once a year my little town of Gerringong has it’s Christmas
Street Parade which is always fabulously hilarious and gives me a swift
reminder of how very “small town” we still are. This year, as every year, my favorite exhibit was the awkward teenage footballers pushing the wheelchairs
of the very old retirement village residents down the steep slop of our main
road. The people who are being pushed don’t look like they quite know where
they are and have clearly been draped in costumes against their will. Last year
each elderly person had a huge over sized bow strapping them into the chair as
they were each a present, the year before that very, very old Marys’ and
Joshephs’ holding very lifeless dolls.
Even better this year the sign that preceded the awkward
footballers for the Retirement Village as this:
This year one of the vintage cars broke down in the middle
of the parade, when eventually they realised this thing was not going to move
the awkward footballers came to the rescue and pushed the car all the way up
the hill.
Someone who had traveled down from Sydney for the Parade
(not entirely sure why) had said what they were amazed at was the lack of road
safety and security in comparison to Sydney. They did put up a yellow caution
tape along the road (the first time that has ever happened, it is councils way
of saying “look, look we tried!”) but there was no security and the trucks were
so close to the gutter, that as my mother sat on the gutter to get a good photo
of the float across the road we had to swiftly pull her out of the way of the
huge decorated fire engine that would have made her part of the slowest hit and
run in the world.
But the best part of the Annual Gerringong Street Parade is
the year that it started and the story of how Santa arrived. Here is the
article from the news paper Christmas 1998, and I want to point out that in the
first line it says “Father Christmas plummeting into the trees only added to
the excitement of the hugely successful Gerringong Street Parade.” Holy shit
that guy could have died!
So basically the big entrance was going to be Santa sky
diving into the middle of the park and then greeting the children with lollies,
unfortunately Gerringong is well known of its wind, so the wind had changed
directions as Santa was gliding down, he got dragged across the park, very
narrowly missed some power lines, plummeted down through a huge tree and ended
by smashing through the windscreen of an antique car! Then before he could recover
hundreds of screaming kids who had been hyped up for the arrival and lollies
over the loud speaker ran at him from all angles (rather like at the golf
course carols) as this guy is still shaking broken glass off himself and trying
to figure out if he has internal bleeding.
That year I happen to also be featured on the front cover of the newspaper sitting next to my friend Violet, I am the one towards the left who is holding my arm up because waving to my adoring fans is too hard.
So yesterday I sat for many hours of tea at the Deli
watching the parade with my old friend Hannah, who I read in my scrapbook from
1998 was one of my new friends for that year.
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| Han was worried about how large her delicous pancakes were. (first world problems!) |
