My Family's Parade Float

Is your family nuts? Did they decide to enter a family float in the Mentor, KY Christmas parade? Then no, your family is not nuts. But mine did, and is, and that makes them way more fun than your family! :) I have no idea how this got started, or whose idea it was. All I know is I now need to stuff a couple more thousand paper napkins into chicken wire before December 11th, the day of the showdown parade.  Let me start by explaining Mentor, which is mostly why this whole thing is hilarious to me. You can pretty much see from one end of Mentor to the other. If one were ever to call a town "Mayberry" for all the reasons we call towns "Mayberry," this town would be it. Exhibit A: the sign taped to my Granny's front door. 

It says "Knock Loudly or if that fails open door and yell." I'm not making this up.

So we're going to make a float, and go down the one side street in Mentor before turning around and coming back up the main drag. And the theme for our float? "Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer", of course! The great-grandchildren are going to be reindeer, my Uncle John, who looks like Santa, will be driving the truck pulling the flatbed as if he's driving the crime scene away. Aunt Cherry will be Mrs. Clause in the sleigh making sure the little reindeer don't catapult themselves over the sides. Granny will be lying against a mailbox (she got run over getting the mail) and the rest of us will be dressed in mourning black following along side the float. Pretty awesome huh? 

I told you Uncle John looks like Santa! And that's my Aunt Cherry of course. 

So now to actually constructing the float. Apparently proper floats have tissue paper stuffed into chicken wire all along the bottom. Tissue paper is super expensive in large quantities, so we went with paper napkins. We all showed up at Granny's at 10am Saturday morning and started working!

Well, mostly we stood around for awhile and looked at it...

But after cousin Joe arrived work began in earnest while they made railings for the sides of the float. 

Cousin Mike--all about safety first!

So things were moving along just fine while we waited for Mom to arrive with all the napkins UNTIL.... an infiltrator drove by!! See my family is trying to keep this a secret from the other 10 people in Mentor. It's very serious business. And SUE (apparently she is our biggest competition) drove by Granny's and slowed down and waved real big as if to say "Oh what's going on here? I'm just waving to be friendly but my laser eyes are taking in everything you're doing in there!" That's when the tarp went up. 

So now that we were protected from infiltrators and Mom had arrived with the napkins, it was time to figure out how exactly we were going to make this happen. 

At some point it was decided that 10 napkins per hole was the magic number. 

Meanwhile, I was helping Granny get lunch ready--homemade cheese coneys!

Yum

That's my Granny! :) Making sweet tea, of course.  

So after a fun-filled day and hard work, we really got almost 50% of the napkin part of the float completed. I was so impressed. And it looks like a real parade float!!

Beginning of the day--I'm thinking there's no way we're going to get this thing done. 

But a couple hours later--holy cow it's a parade float!!!

So stay tuned to the next installment of our float progress. We'll be working on it again very soon! 


Click here to read Part 2!