A Small Canadian Town, Evening Christmas Parade

I shot Santa last night, and the photographic results are not exemplary. But stayed tuned for a taste of a small town (okay, maybe a decent size town, but a town still) Christmas Parade on a cold, Canadian evening.

First off, we miscalculated. With the temperature not going too much below freezing, we didn't dress warmly enough. Yes, I wore a proper coat, but I didn't layer very well, and I didn't wear a proper hat, choosing to wear a Santa hat to keep in the spirit of things.

But when you're out in temperatures below freezing, when there is also a wind, for two hours, you can get darn cold. In point of fact, I didn't warm back up properly until I went to bed many hours later. This is in spite of wearing a hoodie under a think sweater as I watched a hockey game and pored over my photos. My core just didn't warm up. I wonder what my body temperature was at by the end of the parade?

I guess it's true; there's no fool like an old fool.

We got there early because there was to be a Celtic music band at a certain corner for a half hour prior to the parade. That put us near the end of the route, so after the official start time, we had to wait for almost 45 minutes before the parade passed by.

So, by the time the parade ended, I was literally shivering.

One more mistake, photographically speaking, was that I was so intent on listening to and photographing the band, that by the time I was ready to choose my spot for the actual parade, there wasn't a good spot to choose. I ended up a row or two back, so I opted to pull out the LCD screen, tilt it, and hold the camera way over my head to grab whatever shots that I could. (Even holding the camera high, you will see people and other cameras in the way in the pictures.)

So no: in my position, in the cold, and with the camera held over my head, I just did what I could. It was dark, so I had to set the camera at an insanely high ISO (sensor sensitivity), but I still got some usable, if not stellar, images.

After all of that palaver, here we go: A Small Canadian Town, Evening Christmas Parade.

A dog dressed in a seasonably suitable Christmas coat as we waited for the parade to reach us.

The core of such a town parade is trucks, small or big: many trucks, maybe 50 trucks. They were all decorated. This one was pretty impressive.

An occasional tractor.

Sometimes horses.

Other animals show up from time to time, usually walking, but this one was riding in style.

This isn't Macy's in New York, or what used to be the Eaton's parade in Canadian cities like Toronto (I don't know who sponsors those big parades now that Eatons is long gone), so forget fancy floats for the most part. Mostly, it is people sitting on the flat beds of trucks.

But there are exceptions.

Finally, Santa came. Due to my brain freeze, I didn't realize it for a moment while I busied myself shooting the lighted reindeer. But then I got some photos. He was a bad Santa though, lol, because he never looked to our side of the street despite having to linger a bit at our spot.

And that, dear folk, is A Small Canadian Town, Evening Christmas Parade.