The annual Timmins Santa Claus Parade makes its way through the downtown this coming Saturday night. For our weekly feature, local historian Karen Bachmann looks back at the first one.
It happened on Saturday morning, November 26th, 1949. Bachmann says a committee of the Chamber of Commerce organized it to bring Christmas cheer to children.
“More importantly, it would be really, really good to get a really solid core of new Christmas shoppers to the downtown area,” she says. “And that was, I think, sort of the underriding reason for doing the parade.”
The parade theme that first year was Fairy Tales and Nursery Rhymes.
“And they did it in the morning as well,” Bachmann notes, “so guaranteeing that you would have a core group of about 20,000 people, milling about the downtown area, going ‘let’s go shopping,’ and it would be wonderful. So that’s exactly what they did.”
Next Monday: When Santa Claus Parades went by the wayside, and when they were resurrected.
