First, there was the screeching sirens and the blaring horns. Then there was the fife and drum band playing an old-timey rendition of Deck the Halls. Then there was the sweet yet proclamatory sound of a calliope playing carols. It was at that moment I decided, that at eight A.M on a Saturday morning, that these folks were not going to let me sleep.
I had read about the Christmas parade in the preceding days but was unsure whether I was to go. I had a dance that night that I was preparing for and had vigorously danced at one of the restaurants in Williamsburg the night before. I was unsure as to whether I ought to set an alarm for the parade, but decided not to as I was exhausted, for that is what swing dancing does to your muscles.
It turned out that the parade set its own alarm for me. My Austrian roommate was confused and wanted to sleep.
“Is there anything like this in Austria?” I asked him.
“We don’t do parades like this,” he replied to me and tried to go back to sleep.
I was another matter. I was intrigued. I’m from Arlington County up near the District of Columbia. We’d never have anything like it. The upper-class political class that ran the county would never want the noise levels that high, or the traffic to be disrupted, or, God forbid, they seem to do something so ‘small town.’
Arlington County Fairs, held every August, are sterile, milquetoast facsimiles of the actual thing in more rural counties and are aloft with an air of desperation. A Christmas parade put on by those same people, who would never let anyone below a certain income level, would be similar. Therefore I was curious to see how the little town of Williamsburg did it.
The most numerous single type of thing during this parade were old cars, and they were kept in astoundingly good condition. I would have believed it if Henry Ford himself had seen some of them roll off the assembly line. It called to mind the image of 1950s Americana, which looked nice for all its myriad faults.
There were children’s organizations singing carols, and other vehicles playing canned songs, among which were five distinct arrangements of Winter Wonderland and a hip-hop rendition of Jingle Bells, for it seems that modernity touches all little towns to some degree.
There was a truck from the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the police department of Williamsburg and James City County, and four different marching bands from four different high schools. The bands I enjoyed in particular; I was a high school band kid who tried out for the Washington-Lee High School Marching Generals four times and was rejected four times, so I like that sort of ensemble and that sort of music.
It felt so warm, despite the December cold, seeing all the people out for just a high school marching band. For someone from a suburb where next-door neighbors may not know each other’s names, it gave me an odd sort of nostalgia for something I never truly knew.
Most students at the College I talked to about the parade were annoyed that they had been woken up, a sentiment I definitely understand, and feel that the parade ought to be held at a later hour. Nevertheless, I was perhaps the only person among my social circles who discussed it positively.
Seeing a community come together in that way, a way that Arlington never did, warmed my cold and cynical heart, molded as such by the grind that is Washington politics and by Northern Virginia snobbery. It reminded me that, perhaps, community can exist, and we could in some way come together as brother and sister in these trying times.
