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Tulsa Christmas Parade Planned

6 months AGO

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by Holly Wall, News Editor

Tulsa Christmas Parade LLC, spearheaded by Executive Director David Arnett, today announced the Tulsa Christmas Parade, which will be held on Saturday, Dec. 10 at 6pm—coincidentally, the same date and time as the 70-plus-year-old Tulsa Holiday Parade of Lights downtown, presented this year by This Land Press.

The Tulsa Christmas Parade will route through the Tulsa Hills shopping center, moving north from 71^st Street along Olympia Avenue to about Buffalo Wild Wings, 7568 S. Olympia Ave., where today’s press conference was held.

Plans for the Tulsa Christmas Parade have been in the works for about nine months, said Josh McFarland, treasurer of the seven-person board of directors for Tulsa Christmas Parade LLC.

“I just thought we needed a Christmas parade in Tulsa,” he said. “I thought it was a good idea, and so I contacted some like-minded friends and said, ‘Let’s get this thing going.’”

Although the official announcement was made today, KTUL Channel 8 broadcast the story last night, and Arnett said it has spurred quite a response in the community.

“We have received 11 inquiries in the past eight hours for floats and for applications,” he said.

 

 

Arnett was a vocal opponent to the removal of the word “Christmas” from the Tulsa Holiday Parade of Lights’ name, which was publicized last year by Sen. Jim Inhofe’s refusal to participate in the event.

“Radical secularists won the day as the Tulsa City Council Tuesday failed to stand in majority for Tulsa’s historic Christmas Parade,” Arnett wrote on his news website TulsaToday.com on Dec. 8, 2010. “For over 70 years, the parade thrilled children as tens of thousands enjoyed the Holiday Season together in downtown Tulsa. A parade will happen this year, but without Christmas in the name.

“This controversy was created deliberately by duplicity and deception. Apparently, the Parade Committee believes it rules over the Citizens of Tulsa – in considerable arrogance. With no public notice or debate, the name was changed in 2009. When this was discovered, some organizations withdrew.”

Arnett said the Tulsa Holiday Parade of Lights, which includes 60-plus entries every year, has had declining participation since 2007.

“It peaked at about 75 (floats) and has been declining since,” he said. “We (the Tulsa Christmas Parade) hope to premiere at 75 and grow from there.”

Interested participants must fill out an application and include an 8.5-by-11-inch sketch of their planned floats before being accepted into the parade.

Arnett said the purpose of the parade is to celebrate Christmas. He said the date and time were determined by other factors, and not the holiday parade that would be happening simultaneously downtown.

“The reason for that (the date and time) is, first of all, we don’t believe that anyone owns a day,” he said. “So we had to set aside what everybody else was doing and look at what would be best for the Tulsa Christmas Parade. Any closer to Christmas, you get into conflicts and the season just gets busier and busier. Any further away would put us into Thanksgiving and conflicts there.

“Our job is not to make their life difficult. We want them to have a wonderful, successful event. But our mission is to put on the best Christmas parade here on that day as we can. And it will be an opportunity for Tulsans to really decide what their and celebrate the season any way they like. And it’s OK to have two parades.”

Arnett said he attempted to work with the downtown group before establishing a separate parade.

“I live downtown; I work downtown. I enjoy downtown; I want to celebrate it. But when it became clear that no amount of money, no amount of support, no number of volunteers would make the difference to the downtown organization—nothing we could do would lead them to include Christmas in their parade—at that point, if we wanted a Christmas parade for the community, we had no other option. But it was one we explored after fully trying to work with downtown,” he said.

He equated Christmas to the Fourth of July in terms of importance but said people of other faiths are welcome to celebrate Christmas with the Tulsa Christmas Parade—although he doesn’t feel it’s his duty to be inclusive.

“Why would we not have a Christmas parade on the Christmas holiday? Or near enough to celebrate it?” he said. “The concept that you have to devolve yourself into milk toast in order to not offend anyone is contrary to freedom and liberty and the Constitution of the United States of America.

“I reserve the right to be strong in my faith, and I encourage everyone to be strong in theirs, regardless of what that faith may be. But I am not going to set aside what I stand for, what I believe and what I teach my children and my grandchildren just because somebody believes in their Marxist world view that we ought to be the great unwashed masses, indistinguishable from one another.”