| On Friday December 4th and Saturday December 5th the SLVFD had the privilege of escorting Santa through the streets of Saranac Lake.
In past years this has been done on one night and Santa has a much larger procession that has become an annual competition between the area fire departments and recently local business's, etc. for the best decorated truck in the parade. Over the last few years the turn out for this event had gotten quite large. This year however, in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, that event had to be cancelled. But COVID was not about to cancel Santa Claus himself. Instead a small contingent of SLVFD apparatus paraded Santa and Mrs. Claus on two separate nights through the village in a manner where Children could wave to Santa from a safe social distance instead of the large downtown crowd. SLVFD's airboat was converted into a very ample Santa's Sleigh...
The village was broken into two different routes for Santa to follow, so 1/2 of town saw him one night and the other 1/2 got to see him on the second night. During the parade live updates were made on the departments facebook page so residents could track Santa's location.
It was really nice to see the children line up along the streets near their homes, and some came to larger spots such as the Civic Center parking lot, the high school parking lot, and the Sears parking lot. Children could be heard shouting Merry Christmas to Santa as well as trying to shout out their Christmas lists.
We at the SLVFD had a great time doing this, we hope that next year we can get back to our regular format in a safe fashion, but COVID be darned... Santa will be here...
We hope you enjoy some of the night time photo's and video of the event.
Merry Christmas to all!!! |
