Last year's 41st annual Hampden Mayor's Christmas Parade was snowed out, for the first time in its history. This year, it's the 41st annual parade all over again.
"It's the 42nd one, but we're calling it the 41st," said longtime parade organizer Tom Kerr.
Kerr and participants in the Dec. 7 parade — many of them holdovers from last year — are preparing for it with a sense of deja vu. In 2013, former Medfield resident Ciarra Longest was a senior at Hereford High School and was excited about being in her hometown parade, saying at the time, "I always wanted to be in it."
Now, Longest is a freshman in college and once again, she's Miss Yuletide.
And once again, Emma Hammett, now 9, is Junior Miss Yuletide in the parade.
"I was a little disappointed at first (last year), but then I got cheered up knowing I would get to do it next year," Emma said.
Kerr, who's been organizing the parade since it started in 1972, was planning to make last year's parade his final one before turning over the reins to a new organizer. Now, he's back, too. Float favorite The Lone Ranger (Garry Cherricks, of Salisbury, Md.) is jumping back in the saddle. Underdog (Suzanne Muldowney, of New Jersey) is ready to fly, too. Also back will be Naughty Santa (Melanie McMillian, of Crofton), who is new to the public this year, although she showed up last year and would have been in the parade if it hadn't been canceled.
Longtime bands like the Mummers, from Philadelphia, will be back too, as will Baltimore elected officials, including Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, City Council President Jack Young and council members Mary Pat Clarke and Nick Mosby. Also coming are Mr. and Mrs. Santa (Dennis and Karen Margroum of Westminster)
All were ready to roll last year, along with bands from as far away as Virginia, when the snow started to fall. Kerr remembers turning to his son, Brooks, and asking him, "What do you think?"
"Forget it," Brooks said, and they pulled the plug on the only Christmas parade in the city.
"It was a real sick feeling," Kerr said.
A year later, Kerr and most of last year's paraders are picking up where they left off.
Graphic designer Paula Bogert, who lives and works in Hampden, helped design last year's Hampden Village Merchants Association float. The float — eight feet long, four feet wide seven feet tall and built in the shape of an 'H' for Hampden — would have been the business community's first promotional float ever in the parade, but was all dressed up wth nowhere to go in the storm. Bogert and her parade float committee are making a fresh start this year, pulling the float out of its proverbial mothballs but with a new look. Bogert said last year's "tacky" red and green ornaments and other decorations festooning the float are being spray-painted silver.
Other decorations are in keeping with the silver winter wonderland motif, including lots of makeshift tin foil ornaments, such as cans of catfood covered in foil. (This is quirky, kitschy Hampden, after all).
"We're going to be busy up here in my studio," Bogert said.
The float will not be pulled along by bicyclists as originally planned last year.
"My car will pull it," Bogert said. "It's a Subaru, and it happens to be silver."
Two big losses from last year's parade are Scott Lake, Engine 21 fire station captain, and Deron Garrity, then Northern District police captain. Friends since childhood, they were supposed to be co-grand marshals last year, and this year, too, but neither could get away from work, Kerr said. He said he was unable to get a grand marshal for this year's parade.
But for Kerr, the biggest losses were the estimated 30,000 people who turn out each year to watch the parade as it marches from the Poly-Western parking lot to Falls Road and West 36th Street (aka The Avenue), before ending at the Rotunda mall
This year, long-range weather forecasts see no snow on the horizon. Fundraising for the parade has been good, with Kerr collecting $34,000 of the roughly $37,000 he spends each year. His biggest handicap so far appears to be a televised Baltimore Ravens-Miami Dolphins game conflicting with the afternoon parade, but he noted that a lot of men come out to watch the parade at halftime of Ravens games.
And it's not as if Kerr isn't used to facing the threat of inclement weather. He said he calls one local forecaster ever year around this time for an early forecast, and if he doesn't like it, he begs, "Change it. Change it."
He doesn't want to face another snowfall that cancels the parade and empties the streets for the second year in a row.
He's only half-joking and said he's been praying, "Don't let it happen again. It would be a killer. It would make people anxious about coming to the parade" in the future.
Emma agrees. "I'd be a little upset again," she said.
But Kerr is ever the optimist and last week had his own early forecast.
"It's going to be 72 and sunny," he said.