The Polar Express

Newsletter 2024-12-09

The Christmas parade only comes once a year. It doesn’t matter if you personally have multiple Christmases with coworkers, friends, and both sides of your family—or all four to six sides. Remarriages make things complicated but are a great way to get more presents. Milk the holiday for all you want, but Santa only has time for one drive down one street in one city in America. I’m honored and humbled that he chose mine. Sorry to everyone whose Christmas parades featured a pretender over the weekend. Next year, ask to see some ID.

The Christmas parade is a big deal around here. Not as big of a deal as the Fourth of July parade, which, inexplicably, is our suburb’s main social event. It’s no better or worse than the Fourth of July parade anywhere else in America. We just take ours more seriously because we don’t have anything else going on. Not until December, anyway. That’s when Santa shows up and the floats roll again. Our Christmas parade is important enough that it convinced my nine-year-old, Waffle, to un-quit Cub Scouts so she could participate. The December procession has all the glamor of a summer parade, but with the added bonuses of Christmas cheer and frostbite. It’s everything kids love.

My children hate dressing appropriately for the weather. To them, the main purpose of a winter coat is to hang on a hook by the front door until spring, when it will transition to a closet upstairs. Winter coats are meant to be indoor decorations, not outdoor outerwear. This is especially true for my fourteen-year-old, Betsy. She despises wearing her winter coat to school. She claims she has no place to put it when she gets there. Everybody knows you’re supposed to jam it in your locker like it’s a nerd on TV. Betsy insists her coat is too big for that. I refuse to believe her. I’ve seen how my kids pack their dressers at home. They can fit an infinite amount of clothing in any drawer. All it takes is brute force and a total disregard for folding. A crumpled ball is the most efficient shape in nature.

Waffle and my ten-year-old, Lucy, learned from their older sister. When preparing for the Christmas parade, they both asked if they could go without their winter coats. They offered to wear light jackets over a few layers of t-shirts. I let them. It was a rare warm day after an unseasonably cold month. Shortly before Thanksgiving, we were blasted with snow that actually stuck. We don’t usually get our first substantial snowfall until early January. We never expect a white Christmas. We’re more likely to get icy slush or, on an especially cold year, frozen mud. I wonder why Bing Crosby never sang about that? Instead of waiting, this year Mother Nature treated us to multiple snowfalls of an inch or so over the course of a week. It turned the area into a beautiful, frozen hellscape before we’d even enjoyed our turkeys—or attempted to enjoy them since they’re the most overrated of all seasonably edible animals. The last of the snow was over a week ago, which, in the Midwest, is enough time for the area to completely switch climates five times over. The snow melted as the temperature climbed out of the teens and into the lower forties. Compared to the end of November, early December felt like June. I told the kids it was okay for them to wear their light jackets to the Christmas parade. They should really stop trusting me with their survival.

In my defense, I was distracted while making these life-or-death decisions. I was hosting a party. Somebody else’s party, actually. Our board game friends Peter and Delilah had invited us and another couple to their house in the next suburb fifteen minutes away. Lola and I weren’t going to be able to stay for long. I would have to get home to drop off the kids at the start of the parade, watch them in the middle, and pick them up at the end. My life is full of such thrills. While running errands the morning of the party and parade, disaster struck. Peter’s car died in a parking lot a few miles from his house. Despite being in a household with two incomes and no kids, he still drives a vehicle that’s old enough to vote and refuses to buy a new one. It’s that sort of self-sabotaging cheapness that makes us friends. Amidst the complicated logistics of using their second vehicle to rescue the first, Peter and Delilah ended up in our suburb. I volunteered to host their party at our house. Too frustrated to make good choices, they agreed. They brought over a slow cooker full of pot roast and platters overflowing with snacks. All I had to provide was the house, which we unfortunately had to tidy up a bit. The other couple wasn’t yet aware of our normal standard of cleanliness (or lack thereof), so we had to put on airs. And just like that, with only an hour’s notice, we had a ready-made shindig at our house. If only all hosting engagements were so simple.

The main advantage of relocating the gathering to our place was that I didn’t have to bail early because of the parade. The middle of the route was two blocks from our house, and the start was a mile away. I could briefly step out to drop off the kids, then come home to continue gaming. When the parade finally made it close to us, we could walk over to watch. If we had to, we could see the floats from our house, but not well enough to pick out individual people. That wouldn’t suffice. The main purpose of us attending the parade wouldn’t be for us to see the kids, but for the kids to see us seeing them. After that, we could come home to resume our board games before I left one final time to do a quick pickup at the end. Logistically, it all made perfect sense. If only I took into account the weather.

Peter, Delilah, and the other couple showed up at our house around 2 p.m.. We hung out and made it through one game before it was time for me to drop off Waffle and Lucy at 5:15. I drove them to the starting location in the park. Conditions didn’t feel bad when we left the house. I didn’t notice the stiff, frigid breeze until we got there. The much-anticipated float that would whisk my children down the parade route was a fake train on a flatbed trailer pulled by a truck. The front half of the flatbed was built to look like a train engine and the back half was the caboose. That’s where all the scouts would cram in. I hoped the close quarters would keep my kids warm. The thermostat said forty, but the moving air made it feel closer to twenty-five. Scientists should simplify our lives and make the wind chill the official temperature. I don’t care what some tube of mercury says; I care how uncomfortable I am. Feelings are facts after all.

There wasn’t time for me to retrieve more layers for the kids before the start of the parade. They would have to go in what they were wearing. I figured they would be okay. If the body heat of their fellow scouts didn’t save them, perhaps the shape of the float would. For half of the trip, they would be driving into the wind, with the truck and the fake train engine blocking the worst of it. On the back half of the parade, however, the frigid breeze would hit them directly from behind. Hopefully that wouldn’t matter since the float would be moving quicker by then. Unlike the Fourth of July parade, when people line the entire route, at this one, spectators cluster near the turnaround point. That’s where the parade pauses so the one and only real Santa Claus can light our municipal Christmas tree. After that critical moment, the floats are free to gun it toward the finish line. I was counting on that acceleration to keep my children from freezing to death.

I left the kids to their fate and returned home. I wasn’t there for long. We planned to arrive at the parade exactly when the girls came by our section. Timing that out was easier in theory than in practice. The Christmas parade always goes quicker than the summer procession, but a fast parade is still a parade. If only they would turn it into a NASCAR race. To solve that conundrum and make sure we didn’t have to be outside one second more than we had to, I told Lucy to take her phone with her. I used Google Maps to track her location. Thanks to the unreliability of cell towers, Lucy appeared to bounce two or three blocks in random directions. Instead of waiting to leave home until the last second, I panicked. If we got there early, the only risk was hypothermia. But if we got there even one second late and missed the kids, they’d be disappointed for the rest of their lives. I was confident it would be the only thing they’d remember from their entire childhoods. The stakes were too high to stay warm.

The parade was set to start moving at 6 p.m.. That’s when I shooed everyone out of the house. It took a while to get them moving. The other couple didn’t anticipate a nighttime outdoor expedition when deciding what to wear. In case you were wondering, making other people wait in the dark and cold to see children they don’t know is not a fun activity for new friends. The temperature, both real and with wind chill, had dropped substantially since the sun set, a fact I neglected to anticipate when I let my kids leave the house in light jackets. I loaned my heavy winter coat to the wife in the new couple while her husband made due with the hoodie he already had on. I led that grumbling mass of humanity out into the night. We arrived at the parade route two blocks away at 6:15 p.m.. We texted Lucy to ask which side of the float she was on. She said the left. That meant we had to be across the street of the parade, cutting us off from our house. Still, we wanted to be positioned for maximum recognizability. If we waved at them and they couldn’t see us, our frozen discomfort would have been for naught. We took up an unoccupied spot near the turnaround point and waited.

Photo by Colin Lloyd on Unsplash

And waited. And waited. Lucy’s jumpy location on my map app didn’t indicate real-world progress. I promised my group that the parade would arrive swiftly once it got in motion. They were not reassured. Finally, we saw the flashing lights of the lead police car. It led some horses covered in Christmas lights followed by every utility truck in the city, also covered in Christmas lights. I approve of this use of my tax dollars. Finally, the Cub Scout Polar Express came into view. We yelled and waved. Waffle saw us, but Lucy was on the wrong side of the float. I need to teach my kids the difference between right and left. Waffle grabbed her, and Lucy spotted us, too. Lucy tried to throw us candy. It wasn’t a candy-throwing event, but she brought her own from home just for us. Tragically, she couldn’t undo the zipper on her jacket pocket. It wasn’t made to operate in those temperatures. The float moved past. It was 6:35 p.m..

We’d only been out in the cold for twenty minutes. That was nineteen minutes longer than anyone else in the group wanted. There was no way we were sticking it out until the end of the parade. Too bad the procession took up the entire road, which was sort of its whole point. We waited for a slight gap and darted across the street in the dark. We’re lucky we weren’t killed. This wasn’t the five-mile-per-hour parade of the summer. These floats were going at least seven and a half. We arrived back at our house a few minutes later. I checked Google Maps again. Now that it didn’t matter as much, it decided to be accurate. Lucy was nearly back to the starting point. As predicted, after the turnaround, the truck pulling them floored it. I jumped in my van and peeled out. I arrived at the park right as the kids did. They were freezing. The problem wasn’t the light jackets that I had so carelessly approved; it was their hands. They had gloves, but they weren’t sufficient. They needed arctic survival mittens. Next year, I’ll send them with so many layers that they burst into flames, hands and all. I’ll also try not to host a party in the middle of the parade, or at least not one with new people. Guests who already know me will be aware of what they’re getting into.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now. Catch you next time.

James