Christmas Chaos

The Christmas season is officially upon us and it’s now that the chaos begins. This isn’t exactly the personal chaos of shopping, fretting over gift giving, decorating, or not being able to perfectly wrap a gift to save your life. Nope! I’m talking about our annual events, the Christmas Parade and Christmas in the Park. It’s hectic as can be around here, and the weeks leading up to these events have been about trying not to run around like chickens with our heads cut off.

By the time this blog post is published on Facebook, both these events will be over and our office will be able to breathe a collective sigh of relief for another year. The parade and Christmas in the Park are two of the biggest events in Liberty County, and our office of currently 5 employees, along with many volunteers organize and run both events. I won’t say we do this flawlessly, but we give it our best. There are always going to be snags and things that go wrong. Things beyond our control, things we never imagined and things that somehow slipped through the cracks. Hey, Murphy’s Law is real! I double dare you to say it’s not.

I never used to think about parades until I was involved in one. Now when I see the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on TV, I’m fascinated by how they pull it off. The exceptional organizing that goes into that event is rather astounding. Our parade is on a much smaller scale of course, but there are still numerous things to think about and an enormous amount of time, organization, cooperation and resources involved behind the scenes.

In our office, we keep a “Christmas Bible” with all the entries and details about the parade and Christmas in the Park. We have spreadsheets with to do lists, spreadsheets with parade entries, and spreadsheets for Christmas in the Park booths, and emails flowing back and forth about new items that pop up or status updates for other things. We have Santa to schedule, decorations to put up, permits to fill out, commentators to schedule and commentary to create, floats to judge, parade order to figure out, maps to be made, safety regulations to review, booths and tents to be set up, port-a-potties to order (this one may be yucky but it’s super important) and much, much more. We could probably have one person working on this full time from August to December with all the work it takes. But we just pull together and each person does his or her part to make these the best Christmas events they can be.

Christmas in the Park will be a new kind of special this year, since we’ve taken it from a Monday evening to a Saturday daytime event. We’re in uncharted territory, so I’m hoping that things will run smoothly and the Christmas spirit will shine through so everyone can enjoy the day. We’ll see how it goes. We’re big on learning from our mistakes in this office and working to improve, which is why we always have an after-action meeting following any major event, to talk about the good, the bad and the ugly. Typically, there’s plenty of good, some bad and usually very few instances of ugly. It’s all about learning and improving after all, and I’ve found that the folks in Liberty County are usually very receptive and excited for both Christmas events. So cheers to the Christmas Parade and Christmas in the Park! This weekend is gonna be a doozy, but I’m confident it will be worth it. Our Christmas chaos is hopefully your Christmas cheer.

-Amanda Scott, Program Manager for the Liberty County CVB

The Right Blend Blog is written by two different authors employed by the Liberty County Chamber/CVB. As we are able, we rotate weeks and each write about our individual experiences, opinions and let our writing reflect our personalities and creativity. All content provided on The Right Blend blog is for informational purposes only. The owner of this blog makes no representations as to the accuracy or completeness of any information on this site or found by following any link on this site.

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