The Crystal Springs Community Every Other Year Sometimes Spur of the Moment Christmas Parade

Seeing the recent Gadsden Times article entitled Webster’s Chapel Redneck Christmas parade Saturday reminded me of another Gadsden Times holiday article from 2004, World's Shortest Christmas Parade kicks off Christmas in Crystal Springs.  I remember reading the piece while I was home from Denver for the holidays.  It made me shake my head at the hilarity and the familiarity of the behavior, and it reminded me of just one more reason why I love Alabama so much...we have an abundance of characters.  They may be crazy characters, but they are all ours.

The 2004 "Crystal Springs community Every Other Year Sometimes Spur of the Moment Christmas Parade" consisted of three laps around the Crystal Springs One-Stop gas station and boasted farm tractors, lawn mowers, four wheelers, some crowd-pleasing animals, and over two-hundred folks looking to share the holiday spirit.  It was a year of technology (the first time that a generator was used to allow for Christmas lights on a float...Christmas lights that Carl Owen took down "'for the first time in twelve years so that [he] could finish decorating [his] float.'").  It was a year of larceny (the float of the same Carl Owen carried a snowman that was evidently stolen from the yard of competitor Tammy Parris).  It was a year of bribery ("'it's not unusual for judges to take bribes and not deliver -- that's why they're the first to leave after the parade.'")

Things threatened to not crank and stuff caught on fire.  But no one was hurt.