Lights, vehicles, Santa — it’s parade time
Celebration makes post-covid comeback
Illuminated buildings replaced Te Puke’s Christmas Float Parade last year. This year, we are getting both. Covid uncertainty saw the cancellation of last year’s parade.
Keen to ensure Te Puke still celebrated the season as a town, EPIC Te Puke marketing manager Rebecca Larsen created Christmas town — a competition for anyone to decorate their home or commercial building with a Christmas theme.
While the parade can once again go ahead, the popularity of Christmas
Town means it will happen, too.
“We just loved Te Puke Christmas Town from last year,” says Rebecca.
“Some people went to a lot of effort and we want to keep that going. We are lucky enough to have sourced some prizes from Mitre 10 to do that.”
Anyone who is part of a Christmas lights trail can enter Christmas Town.
The entries will be judged by the public, so anyone entering will be asked to upload photos or videos to the Te Puke Online website, or to Youtube and to provide a link.
The return of the parade means there is also a seat next to Santa up for grabs.
Traditionally, EPIC Te Puke has invited a deserving child to share Santa’s sleigh.
“We’d like to give the opportunity to a child who needs a bit of extra
Christmas cheer to ride with Santa.”
Anyone who knows someone who might be deserving can email details to secretary@epictepuke.co.nz.
The theme of this year’s parade is vehicles. “It’s looking really good. We’ve got some great entries coming through and lots of interesting vehicles coming through, but we are looking for more,” says Rebecca.
“We are looking for anything from farms, industry, kiwifruit — anything interesting, even down to, if a group wants to do something like skateboards or scooters or roller skates. Anything goes really.”
The idea this year was to keep the theme simple.
“We are coming out of quite a difficult period, but we still want to celebrate Christmas.”
The cut-off for entries for the December 3 parade is November 25 while entries for Christmas Town can be submitted up to December 10 with a week of public voting to follow.