’Tis the season, but where’s the spirit?
‘Eerie’ downtown is desolate rather than decked out as pandemic poo-poos tradition
David and Sharon Reese strolled across Smith and Walker near Houston City Hall on Thursday morning, barely looking north to see if any passing cars were coming their way.
No one was. These days, especially weekends and holidays, David Reese said it is almost like they have the “run of the place” as they take a walk from their downtown condo.
On a typical Thanksgiving, they would be fighting their way through the crowd at Smith and Walker, not walking around unconcerned with cars.
Throngs of sometimes-bundled Houston residents lined downtown streets each Thanksgiving for 70 years to view the floats, marching bands and waving politicians, not to mention Santa. That’s 13 presidential administrations from Truman to
Trump with a Thanksgiving parade.
In 2020, however, COVID-19 did what wars and weather could not and stopped Santa and Tom Turkey in their tracks. Officials put the brakes on the H-E-B Thanksgiving Day Parade months ago and said Wednesday they did not expect many, or any, to make their way downtown.
“We need to give the public more credit than we sometimes do,” said Susan Christian, director of the Mayor’s Office of Special Events. “People are very in tune with what is going on.”
What’s going on — what’s seemingly gone on the entire year — is nothing. No rodeo. No Art Car Parade. No July Fourth fireworks – at least not lined sideby-side on the street. Officials instead took that celebration indoors with the Houston Symphony in a spectator-free Jones
Hall and streamed it online.
Thursday the route was hardly a parade — cars and buses passing by in small packs of three or four with large gaps of nothing between. Traffic was so light around 9:15 a.m. that a couple stopped in the middle of Milam in a small SUV.
“Where’s the parade,” the woman yelled from the passenger seat, sad to hear it was canceled. They live nearby and come every year, said the woman, declining to give her name. Just in case, they swung by.
Other than passing cars, downtown was desolate and left to a few dozen people running, walking or still curled up on a bench sleeping.
“It can be eerie at times, these big buildings and no one around,” David Reese said.
For many, the year has been a decidedly different look. It’s been an adjustment at a time when people are struggling to remain solvent financially, shifting people from planning events to plotting philanthropic efforts. Christian noted that in lieu of a parade, the city organized the passing out of meals to those in need, part of a pattern of food giveaways.
“Those lines are getting longer, not shorter,” Christian said.
Still, people need relief, she said, perhaps a sense of togetherness or a jumpstart of holiday spirit. It’s just come this year not from the city’s Christmas lighting outside City Hall or as multitudes watch multi-colored trees come to life along Post Oak, but a sound studio. Rather than spending Wednesday working through the final rehearsals and logistics for the Thanksgiving parade, Christian was tweaking the script for next week’s holiday lighting, which will be streamed online, then packaged into a one-hour television special to be broadcast Dec. 18.
Uptown officials, just in their second year of a revived Post Oak lighting, will go forward with their plans but without crowds, pushed out to people via social media.
The venues might change, officials said, but not the seasonal spirit, especially as people search for something to hope for.
“One thing you cannot do is dampen people’s spirits,” Christian said.