Strike Up the Band for the Holidays

The smallest football player wore a red sweater and a green sweater under his jersey. Each of the rest of the squad had an extra garment or two to buffer against the nip in the air and still show off the proud colors of their football uniforms.

They were teams from one of the midget leagues of football teams, kids 8 and 9, maybe, and they were marching sturdily in the Christmas parade at Blue Jay, near Lake Arrowhead High in the San Bernardino Mountains.

Madeline and Clifford Anderson, who live in Monarch Bay in South Laguna, were in the mountains last weekend and had the wonderful good sense to drive to Blue Jay to see the parade. They gave me this account of it when I visited them after they got back to Monarch Bay last Sunday night.

The parade started at 5 o’clock in the clear, cold evening, just as shadows started to cover the foot of the mountains. The annual Blue Jay Christmas parade leans strongly toward the young residents. Blue Jay, happily, is not a very big place and most of the people in town were involved in the parade in some way. They supplied a kid to march or hot chocolate later for the participants.

Madeline said the Boy Scouts were well represented, marching straight and tall along the parade route, their hard-won badges carefully stitched to their uniforms.

There were two fine bands, their bright notes rolling down the mountainsides, and if there were here and there a muffed note, it was safely hidden in the determined ensemble work.

Santa Claus rode in the back of a pick-up with taped music blending with the ho-ho-ho’s. He was accompanied by the smallest kids wearing sparkling antlers.

Madeline said she was able to give such an accurate account of the promenade because there were quite long waits between groups. If you have ever had anything to do with a parade having mostly children as marchers, you are well aware of the hazards. Antlers fall off, people leave sweaters in the car, people want to wait for friends who are late, people have to go to the bathroom.

She said another group of sweatered and jerseyed athletes were a basketball squad, bouncing their large basketballs in front of them down the street.

There were two disc jockeys, who rode on decorated trucks, playing taped holiday music. A beautiful large, black dog with a harness pulled a miniature hay wagon with a decorated Christmas tree on it. His master walked long beside him. Really, the dog led the kid. The dog was apparently an old parade hand and accepted the applause and cheers with ducal bows to left and right. This dog was pure class and well aware of it.

Three young women with Dobermans were a favorite with the audience, Madeline said. The handsome dogs lay down on command, got up, stayed seated while their mistresses walked ahead and then followed them on command.

The snow shovelers’ precision drill team, which had appeared in Pasadena’s Doo-Dah parade, made a brave show, with its members brandishing their shovels like flag girls and snapping out their exercises with style and spirit. It’s hard to be precise when you’re waving a snow shovel, but they managed with crispness and determination.

Madeline and Cliff spent the night with friends at Arrowhead, then drove back to Monarch Bay last Sunday, picking up their large Christmas tree on the way. Clifford hauled it in the house and Madeline dug out the stand, the kind with the screws that wind into the tree and brace it tall and straight. That’s what it says on the directions. What it does not tell you is that one person has to crawl underneath and fight the screws and the heavy part of the trunk and the other person has to balance the top of the tree and have the branches and the needles scratch her almost to the point of Band-Aids.

Clifford, who is 6-foot-6, obviously was the standard-and-trunk man while Madeline held the tree around its waist. Clifford is a good and kind man who occasionally loses a little patience and roars like a lion with a wounded paw.

He called, “Is it straight yet? Now, is it straight? What are you doing? Answer me and tell me which way.”

Madeline wrestled with the giant of the forest until it was relatively straight and so told the low man on the Christmas tree.

Then she suggested that they quit the project for the evening, even though the tree might not be quite in plumb, lest they have an argument that might cause Clifford to roar like a Swedish mountain king and the tree to fall out of its holder. And they did, and all was peace.

I hope holiday plans are proceeding in an ordered fashion at your house with the cards addressed, the tablecloth located and the duller relatives all in Hawaii for the festive season.

And if that’s true at your house, I don’t want to hear about it. I may just go up to Blue Jay and wait for the big black dog to come by again. Oh, ring out the bells.