It’s Granada Hills’ Day to Come Up Roses

My family is gearing up for the big Granada Hills Christmas Parade this weekend.

What? You’ve never heard of the San Fernando Valley’s largest parade?

Unlike the Doo-Dah and Rose extravaganzas that sandwich it, the GHCP costs nothing to enter, not a single flower loses its life and bands don’t vie for the honor of appearing on Chatsworth Street. Same goes for beauty queens propped up on rolling Barbie Doll stands and 50-foot-long raffia-wrapped floats.

A pickup covered with aluminum foil is more Granada Hills’ speed. If you own a late-model convertible, a City Council member is yours to squire along the parade route. A brand new convertible, courtesy of Galpin Chevrolet, usually schleps the Grand Marshall, whom you probably won’t recognize. This year, Captain Planet (hint: he’s got a kid’s television show) probably aced out some minor but jiggly soap star for the honor.

The really big entries--you can’t exactly call them floats--usually include trucks with tinsel draped across the grille and flatbeds packed shoulder-to-shoulder with church choirs or 4-H club members.

Since you don’t have to have much or be famous to enter the GHCP, my Brownie Girl Scout troop met last weekend to make its marching costumes, and I did a 14-foot-long banner for my son’s Cub Scout pack to carry.

“The Granada Hills parade is a youth-oriented parade. It’s a hometown community event,” says parade chairman John Ciccarelli, co-owner of the Granada Hills-based Kirby Vacuum Co. “Our parade has all those little Brownies dressed up like packages. They’re so cute.”

(Rats, that’s what my Brownies did for costumes.)

There will also be lots of marching bands, some with ill-fitting but matching jackets and unmatched pants, scads of drill teams and Laker Girl wanna-bes.

One group from a local Catholic school always manages to march the entire parade route in high heels. Even after cresting the final hill, where all the other kids break down and flop on the sidewalk, these girls will still be kicking and dancing and giving it their all.

Equestrian groups, classic car clubs, a historic stage coach and Daffy Duck of Magic Mountain will be other headliners among the 165 entries, Ciccarelli says.

This morning we’ll gather at the Granada Hills Recreation Center at the corner of Petit Avenue and Chatsworth. The parade usually starts on time, around 1:30, and it’s about a two-mile hike, uphill, at parade pace, which is a lot like an extended wedding march, about 20 steps then a 20-second pause, 20 steps, 20-second pause. The end of the trail is the Coast Federal Bank parking lot.

Ciccarelli says on a good year (meaning no rain) about 25,000 people show up. Doesn’t seem like that many to me. I see lots of unpopulated gaps in the route, and at the thickest, folks stack up only two or three deep along the sidewalk. It’s real slow and easy and nothing spooks the horses or the first-year Brownies.

I like it. It’s my favorite holiday event.