Beach bonanza

June Casagrande

This year’s Christmas Boat Parade is guaranteed to be totally

beachin’. The chamber of commerce has announced the theme for this

year’s boat parade is “A Holiday Beach Celebration.”

The idea is to decorate the 100-plus boats likely to be in the

parade in classic California Christmas style.

“Our thinking here is for the boat owners to be able to get

creative with a particular theme,” said Richard Luehrs, president and

chief executive of the Newport Beach Chamber of Commerce. “So this

year, we’re seeing the theme as a beach Christmas. We see things like

surfboards ... or beach apparel. We see beach balls -- that kind of a

thing.”

And it doesn’t just stop with the boats. The theme also applies to

the annual Ring of Lights home-decorating competition, in which

residents all around the parade route decorate their homes to get in

on the parade excitement.

As always, decorating according to the theme is optional. In a

typical year, Luehrs said that anywhere from 25% to 40% of the parade

participants choose to decorate according to the theme. The rest of

them go for traditional Christmas decorations or some theme of their

own. The exception was the 2001 parade, themed “Let Freedom Ring,” in

which a majority of the boats were decked out in red, white and blue.

“That was an extraordinary year in our history,” Luehrs said.

The parade will take place Dec. 17 through 21. It will follow the

same schedule and route through the harbor as last year, with an

extended parade route on Friday and Saturday night and a shortened

route on weeknights to make getting involved even easier for boaters.

“We hope to see a lot of people running wild with imagination,”

Luehrs said.