The Christmas City Parade

50 years of floats, snow, and mistletoe

Tony Bennett

In one of the many boardrooms of the Northland’s NewsCenter building in Canal Park, people are assembling. It’s an overcast, dreary day in late August, but the talk in this room will, in just a few minutes, turn to the topic of Santa Claus.

Station manager David Jensch is one of the last to arrive. He sits down, arranges his notes, and asks “What is the agenda, today? Who remembers?” News director Barbara Reyelts, who has worked with Jensch for a lot of years, gets right to the point. “Parade,” she says.

The Christmas City of The North Parade, to be exact. That beloved yearly harbinger of the holiday season is this year celebrating its fiftieth anniversary. Over the last quarter century, this community has come to depend on the Northland’s NewsCenter to produce the Christmas City of the North parade, and that responsibility is taken on with pride, joy, and humor.

It Doesn’t Just Happen

The November event takes a massive amount of planning and organizing, and that’s why the first parade meeting takes place at the end of summer. In a sense, it’s like the staff at the Northland’s NewsCenter are going to start a side business for a few months in addition to their other duties.

After a few minutes of conversation that careens from how to properly highlight the history of the parade to whether serving free refreshments is doable, it becomes obvious to the observer that this year’s anniversary parade is going to be one of the best, most involved yet. It has become a yearly tradition for people here in Duluth~Superior, and those who work at the station are careful stewards of that tradition.

“For people who live in the Northland, who grew up watching it on TV, it’s similar to watching How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” David Jensch says. “The parade is near and dear to people.”

For Jensch, the reason is simple: Northlanders have an extremely personal connection to the parade. “When you talk to people who have lived here their whole lives, [many of them] danced in a dance group or they rode on a float. Everybody has memories of the Christmas City of the North Parade. As long as we can continue to break even, it’s worth our time and effort.”

Ah, breaking even. Beyond all the hard work, this thing takes a lot of money to get up and running. Jensch is more than aware of the uniqueness and novelty of a televised local parade in this profit-driven time. “In today’s world, a television station would never put on a live event just to break even.”

There was a time, though, back in the early days of the event, when money was what it was all about. Jensch says the creation of the parade in 1958 was an effort to kick off the start of the holiday shopping season. Back in the day, the parade was designed as a magnet that would draw potential spenders to the downtown area. Now, it’s a community event, something that brings together all the locals, whether they’re watching on TV, standing on the sidelines, or heroically trying to get their frozen lips to coax the right notes from their trumpets.

Can You See Johnny?

The NewsCenter team is committed to making the parade better year after year.

“I think our technical execution gets better every year,” Jensch says. “One of our priorities has been getting closer to the parade participants, both in the parade and along the parade route. Better audio, better information, closer pictures, so the viewer feels more intimate with the parade, so it’s more like being there. The Christmas City parade of the past was a pretty dark and distant television event, yet it was hugely popular – the highest-rated locally produced television of the year. Still is.”

In the last few years, they’ve begun broadcasting the parade over the Internet, and Jensch proudly speaks of getting emails of appreciation from expat Duluthians from all over the country and the globe at large. For many, it just wouldn’t be the holiday season without the parade. It’s as vital as egg nog. (And let’s not forget the essential Merv Griffin theme song, which instantly switches locals over to “holiday mode” with Pavlovian efficiency.)

Jensch, smiling, happily recounts some of the more notable mishaps in past parades — anchors trying to talk into gale-force winds, being bitten by tiny horses, and having to fend off jolly (read: inebriated) revelers.

It’s a big responsibility, being the caretakers of one of Duluth’s most beloved events, but those caretakers are happy to do the job. And Jensch could be speaking as any average Northlander when he says: “We feel a personal connection to the parade. We hope we can keep it going for years to come.”

Tony Bennett is a Duluth-based writer.