The annual Good Hope Christmas Parade and Christmas in the Park will be held this Saturday, Dec. 9. / Tribune file photo, 2016
GOOD HOPE – The annual Good Hope Christmas Parade will start at 2 p.m. on Saturday, Dec. 9. The parade, which will start at the high school and end at the municipal park, will be followed by Christmas in the Park, where visitors can enjoy the kid zone with train rides, hayrides, bouncy houses, the cookie house and Santa Claus. Free food will be provided by the City of Good Hope.
“Well this year we are going to make our cookie house bigger because we haven’t been able to contain everybody and get kids in fast enough,” City Clerk Christie Chamblee said. “We’re going to have s’mores that’ll be ready for everybody and we’ll have some professional face painters come in this year as well. The biggest deal is that our cookie house is going to be much bigger, I also think our parade is going to be bigger; we’ve had a lot more people sign up for the parade this year.”
Mayor Jerry Bartlett is also excited about some of the new features that will be on display at this year’s Christmas celebration as well as some adjustments to their traditional features.
“We used to have two little out-buildings down there for the cookie houses and this year we’re going to have one and we’re going to completely wrap our pavilion with plastic and make a little house and heat it so that we’ll have more room,” Bartlett said. “We’ve got our train back this year that we had last year. We’ll have the hayride back from last year, too. The cookie houses have really gone over well; everybody always wants to do it, even the adults, but we didn’t have any room. Now by putting it up under the pavilion we’re going to be able to get a lot of people in there to decorate their cookies.
“We throw candy out during the parade and there are just tons of people up and down the road when we come through there and the young kids seem to love those parts better because of Santa and the cookies and the train ride,” continued Bartlett. “The younger kids love the parade and they love to come eat, but they love all the other activities like the hayride, too. It’s always been a very successful event and we’ve seen it steadily grow over the years.”
For more information, call Good Hope City Hall at 256-739-3757.
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