When My Parade Got Rained Upon: A Quick Photo Essay

So, Lansing has this little downtown event the Friday before Thanksgiving. Silver Bells in the City. An after-dark parade ending with Santa arriving before Thanksgiving because who’s crazy enough to do a nighttime event in mid-Michigan weather after Thanksgiving, a little street festival, Santa Claus holding court in the City Market, that sort of thing. And then this past weekend …

The Silver Bells electric light parade has been going for twenty years now, not continuously. Normally it’s on the coldest night of the winter, but this year it started on a night that was like 70 degrees.

At the Silver Bells In The City electric-lights parade and State Christmas Tree lighting ceremony. 7:13 pm.

Apparently the Lugnuts were going to be named something like the River Dragons until someone pointed out there were already about fourteen teams named “Dragons” in our division of minor-league baseball. Also there used to be a companion Little Lug dragon that has just been missing and unremarked-upon for decades now.

At the Silver Bells In The City electric-lights parade and State Christmas Tree lighting ceremony. 7:17 pm. The walrus-y figure there is Big Lug, the kind-of dragon-y mascot for the Lansing Lugnuts minor league baseball team. The tusks are lug nuts or something poking out. The team name made more sense back when they were playing at Oldsmobile Park.

And at this point I just started snapping pictures wildly because it was so funny and most of them don’t get that spirit of running crazily for what we hope is going to be shelter somewhere. I’d apologize that the picture is blurry but the night was blurry at that point.

At the Silver Bells In The City electric-lights parade and State Christmas Tree lighting ceremony. 7:19 pm. Like twenty second later on as we all race for any kind of shelter. Where? We had no idea. My love saw a single isolated shoe left on the flooded streets. I didn’t see it even though I was following close behind. It was a bit mad.

The remainder of festivities is cancelled due to extreme weather. Please get to safety.

— SilverBellsintheCity (@SilverBellsLans) November 19, 2016

Meanwhile this reassuring tweet went out. You know you’re having a good time when you get the instruction, “Please get to safety”.

And here inside City Hall there was relative dryness and shelter and off to the right a fife band that I guess they’d had standing by for just this sort of contingency? I don’t know. Also they had a popcorn stand because again huh? By the elevator bank they had stockings hung, each with the name of some municipal department — Finance, Public Service, that sort of thing — on them.

At the Silver Bells In The City electric-lights parade and State Christmas Tree lighting ceremony. 7:23 pm. Also so apparently they had emergency fife bands ready just in case everything outside was cancelled and they had a slice of a hundred-thousand-person mob in City Hall who needed something to mill around in front of?

So this was the first year they had a topper for the Christmas Tree, this nice five-foot-tall three-dimensional star. A half-hour after the storm front moved through it wasn’t quite so level as it had been.

At the Silver Bells In The City electric-lights parade and State Christmas Tree lighting ceremony. 7:43 pm, after the worst of the winds had blown through.

So we were laughing about being through all this through to about mid-day Sunday when we were finding dollar bills in our wallets were still damp and we’re still seized with a couple giggles. In the meanwhile have you seen my humor blog and its talk about comic strips? It hasn’t got any nearly so dramatic pictures, I admit.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

Although the Another Blog, Meanwhile index remains below par the alternate index did rise five points on the day. Analysts credit this to traders finding and doing an archive-binge on Jonathan Larsen’s fantastic newsletter that we’ll just call The Fing News because we are careful about the sort of language we use here. More perceptive analysts point out they’ve known about the thing since it started way earlier this year and there’s no reason to pretend they only just discovered it now. Both are legitimate points to make. Anywhere here’s Larsen’s main Twitter account if you’d like to see that too.

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