Cesca Has No Idea: If this Santa still deals with Post Traumatic Stress

Once a year my little town of Gerringong has it’s Christmas Street Parade which is always fabulously hilarious and gives me a swift reminder of how very “small town” we still are. This year, as every year, my favorite exhibit was the awkward teenage footballers pushing the wheelchairs of the very old retirement village residents down the steep slop of our main road. The people who are being pushed don’t look like they quite know where they are and have clearly been draped in costumes against their will. Last year each elderly person had a huge over sized bow strapping them into the chair as they were each a present, the year before that very, very old Marys’ and Joshephs’ holding very lifeless dolls.

Even better this year the sign that preceded the awkward footballers for the Retirement Village as this:

This year one of the vintage cars broke down in the middle of the parade, when eventually they realised this thing was not going to move the awkward footballers came to the rescue and pushed the car all the way up the hill.

Someone who had traveled down from Sydney for the Parade (not entirely sure why) had said what they were amazed at was the lack of road safety and security in comparison to Sydney. They did put up a yellow caution tape along the road (the first time that has ever happened, it is councils way of saying “look, look we tried!”) but there was no security and the trucks were so close to the gutter, that as my mother sat on the gutter to get a good photo of the float across the road we had to swiftly pull her out of the way of the huge decorated fire engine that would have made her part of the slowest hit and run in the world.

But the best part of the Annual Gerringong Street Parade is the year that it started and the story of how Santa arrived. Here is the article from the news paper Christmas 1998, and I want to point out that in the first line it says “Father Christmas plummeting into the trees only added to the excitement of the hugely successful Gerringong Street Parade.” Holy shit that guy could have died!

So basically the big entrance was going to be Santa sky diving into the middle of the park and then greeting the children with lollies, unfortunately Gerringong is well known of its wind, so the wind had changed directions as Santa was gliding down, he got dragged across the park, very narrowly missed some power lines, plummeted down through a huge tree and ended by smashing through the windscreen of an antique car! Then before he could recover hundreds of screaming kids who had been hyped up for the arrival and lollies over the loud speaker ran at him from all angles (rather like at the golf course carols) as this guy is still shaking broken glass off himself and trying to figure out if he has internal bleeding.

 

 That year I happen to also be featured on the front cover of the newspaper sitting next to my friend Violet, I am the one towards the left who is holding my arm up because waving to my adoring fans is too hard. 

 

So yesterday I sat for many hours of tea at the Deli watching the parade with my old friend Hannah, who I read in my scrapbook from 1998 was one of my new friends for that year. 

Han was worried about how large her delicous pancakes were. (first world problems!)