By: Dean Vaglia | Mount Clemens-Clinton-Harrison Journal | Published November 20, 2024
MOUNT CLEMENS — On Nov. 23, the Mount Clemens Santa Parade will make its annual stroll through the city at 10 a.m., with marchers and floats leading old Father Christmas himself down Main Street and to Macomb Place, kicking off the holiday season.
Just as it did last year, and just as it first did nearly 50 years ago.
According to the Mount Clemens Parade Company, the Santa Parade began in 1975. Initially, a single float brought Santa to Prieh’s Department Store on the Friday after Thanksgiving. It was rolled into bicentennial celebrations for 1976 and the Macomb County Chamber of Commerce’s Merchants in Action division began sponsoring the parade in 1977. Organization and sponsorship of the parade would change over the years with First National Bank taking over in 1989, later joined by Mount Clemens General Hospital in 1994 to run the parade under the banner of Metro Macomb Productions.
However, things began to take a turn for the worse behind the scenes as the 2000s went on and fewer companies and organizations were stepping up to sponsor the parade. This, it turns out, presents a slight problem.
“People don’t realize it takes money to run the parade because we have to pay the bands, and a lot of the other people in the parade get paid, which a lot of people didn’t know,” said Mount Clemens City Commissioner Barb Dempsey, a former Mount Clemens mayor.
Around October 2006, the hospital said it no longer had the sponsorship support to run the parade. In the wake of that announcement, then-mayor Dempsey and other community organizations and leaders worked to make sure that something — anything — would be there to usher in St. Nick.
“We launched a big ‘Save the Parade’ (campaign),” Dempsey said. “The papers got involved and the Lions Club and Kiwanis. Everybody chipped in so we could save the parade.”
Over $15,000 was pledged to an ad-hoc private committee led by Dempsey and a meeting with the hospital was secured.
“They basically took us to their storage unit and said, ‘You can have the sled. We’re going to give you all the paperwork,’ and they just kind of handed it over to us,” Dempsey said. “There was no sitting down and going through how this works. ‘We can’t do it any longer. Here’s everything.’”
By the end of November, the committee had a parade. They were able to raise the funds and found the necessary people to make it happen, eventually running the parade as part of the Mount Clemens Foundation for nearly two more decades. In the late 2010s, the parade date was moved from the day after Thanksgiving to the Saturday after, a change in tradition Dempsey said was done to make it easier to book bands and allow the parade organizers a chance to enjoy Thanksgiving with their families.
The COVID-19 pandemic led to the 2020 parade being canceled, but that coincided with another change in organization.
“At that time the parade committee met we all decided it was time to pass the baton,” Dempsey said. “We were doing it for a number of years. People were getting burnt out … They couldn’t have Thanksgiving with their families because we were working putting the parade together.”
The post-2006 committee was disbanded in March 2020 and a new committee, led by longtime supporter Michelle Weiss and parade emcee Patrick Linabury, was formed. The Mount Clemens Parade Company 501(c)(3) held its first parade in 2021.
Linabury, who has been involved with the parade since 2006, said changes that have come to the parade since the new company took over have been mostly behind the scenes.
“We are doing more online work,” Linabury said. “We are able to organize online through a program called Parade Cloud, which has really cut down the amount of work that we’ve had to do as far as meetings and other things. That’s been a huge burden off of a lot of people’s shoulders. It’s a lot easier to put together now.”
Planning the parade is a yearlong process with monthly meetings and two fundraisers: Christmas in July and the Nightmare Before Christmas Pub Crawl. Meetings begin in January and increase as November draws closer. Sponsorships are secured during this time as well with various funding tiers and other opportunities, such as sponsoring breakfast for volunteers or the main stage. The Mount Clemens Lions Club was the presenting sponsor for 2024.
As important as funding is for making the parade happen, maintaining organizational efficiency is the most important part of managing the parade for Linabury.
“We have really good people who care about what we’re doing,” Linabury said. “We’re organized now. We’re able to do things faster and more efficiently, really get a hold of our volunteers faster and more efficiently and know what we need as far as that stuff goes. Those are the kind of things that make you nervous, thinking you don’t have enough help, and then you realize we’re 85% there before we even start. We just have to reach out to our folks and make sure everybody is on board.”
Finding volunteers has been a challenge. Numerous roles from costumed characters to backstage personnel are open for volunteers, but the issue comes to finding people willing to fill the roles. Erik Rick, now a Mount Clemens city commissioner, came to the parade committee after having gained relevant experience in the U.S. Navy.
“Part of what I would do is direct amphibious landings,” Rick said. “You’ve got to make sure that the right landing craft reach the beach at the right time in the right order, and you also have to plan all that stuff out in a complicated spreadsheet. While (the parade) is not the same as putting Marines on the beach, it’s getting the right things in the right order in the right place at the right time, and Patrick knew I had the skillset that sort of matched.”
Rick, for his part, finds the parade a little more difficult than conducting landings, though herding Marines is not a necessary skill all volunteers must have.
“We’re looking for anyone who is willing to lend a hand,” Rick said. “We’re really going to be able to find a place for people with whatever their skillsets and interests are. We’ve got volunteers that run a full range of ages … There’s no max age. If you’re willing to lend a hand, we’d love to have you help.”
And for all the work that goes into making the Mount Clemens Santa Parade happen, volunteers and organizers find their way to help with the parade because keeping the tradition alive is important to them, as well as to the many people who line Main Street year after year.
“It’s a tradition,” Dempsey said. “Mount Clemens is an older community, and I think we don’t have a lot of continuous traditions in town, and this is one that started back in ’75 and it’s still here today in 2024. I think that says a lot for the community. It’s a joy to go down the street and see all the kids, and for them to see Santa come. It’s so nice to see a tradition continuing and I would hope it would continue.”
More information about the parade and how to volunteer for it can be found at mountclemenssantaparade.com.