The bag of pork cracklin’s – like manna from heaven – fell unexpectedly from the sky and was quickly devoured. I had arrived for Mardi Gras in the Big Easy just an hour before, and proceeded to take my place in the throng along the Uptown route for the Krewe of Thoth parade. Many, many beads and other assorted throws would follow. So, too, did a fatal shooting that night at the Krewe of Bacchus parade – fortuitously after I had retired to my hotel room for the night. Some new friends that I made in New Orleans invited me on Fat Tuesday to walk in the Society of Saint Anne parade, from the Marigny neighborhood to the French Quarter. I didn’t have a crazy costume to wear, but I sported my best enthusiasm for the occasion. Spectating at a parade is one thing – participating is quite another.

In May, I enjoyed the volksparade at the annual Tulip Festival in Orange City, Iowa. In addition to the usual floats and fire engines and beauty queens, the volksparade featured several marching bands trudging along the entirety of the parade route in honest-to-goodness Dutch wooden shoes, or klompen. Talk about dedication! And it concluded with the curious Dutch custom of washing the street afterwards with buckets and brooms. Parades can be messy affairs, after all.

Orange City is just a few miles – as the crow flies – from my father’s hometown of Inwood, Iowa. Although I didn’t get to the Inwood Fourth of July parade this summer, the Tulip Festival parade’s small-town charm reminded me of the many times I’ve sat along the edge of the park in Inwood and watched their lovely small-town parade… of tractors, and marching bands, and beauty queens, and fire trucks, and flatbed floats, and finally the horses. (The horses always come last, don’t they?) I hope to be back in Inwood cheering on the parade in 2024.

I’ve always been an early riser, and from my earliest childhood I remember watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade on TV while the more somnolent members of my family slept in. This year on Thanksgiving, I arose long before dawn in midtown Manhattan to secure a prime viewing spot along 6th Avenue to see this classic parade in person. Some protesters momentarily disrupted the parade, gluing their hands to the pavement and forcing the marching bands and balloon handlers to scoot around them. But the parade marched on.

I’m not sure if parades were a thing in Palestine two thousand years ago. But I do know that a parade of Magi marched from the East on a caravan of dromedaries, heralding the birth of the King of Kings. And an entirely different sort of parade heralded that same King’s end, when the Romans marched him as a spectacle through the streets of Jerusalem on Good Friday. Our spectacles are not always exactly spectacular.

As 2023 comes to a close, and we mark the triumphs and tragedies that have marched along in time over the past year, take a moment to ponder your experience of the whole glorious pageantry of the parade of humanity. You’ve been a spectator and a participant. Things have been thrown at you, and both clowns and beauty queens have waved as they passed by. There have been missteps and disruptions, but the parade has marched on. Music alongside mayhem. Lots of waiting followed by fleeting moments of amusement and distraction – hopefully some smiles and cheers. The route got messy, the horses did their thing, and you did your best to clean up and get on with things afterwards. May the year ahead find you the honored Grand Marshal of your life… and may you enjoy every crazy, colorful, convoluted moment along the way.