The first Saturday of December once again brought joy to my small hometown.

This is the day when the annual Christmas parade brings several thousand locals to sidewalks in the center of town to watch, laugh, and shout with boisterous pride as floats, dancers, and marching bands wind their way through the cold streets.

As in years past, churches, schools, and small businesses – the heart of the community – sponsored most of the entertainment. Pickups pulled floats featuring the Grinch, Santa’s workshop, and the Babe in the manger; bands thumped out the tunes of “All I Want for Christmas” and “Joy to the World”; banners proclaimed the birth of the Christ Child.

Crowned in July at the county fair, the town’s Little Miss, a kid who looks to be seven or eight years old, brings cheers as her float passes. Dancers from the Jig ‘n’ Jive Studio bounced up and down; floats advertised businesses like Mr. Rooter Plumbing, Edward Jones, and the Hang 10 Car Wash. Marchers and riders on the floats rained candy on the crowd, delighting the kids who scooped it from the street as if they’d struck gold.

Sophisticates whose exquisite taste has driven joy from their hearts might judge this parade and others like it across the nation as slapdash, rinky-dink affairs, and they could make a case for that verdict. Compared to extravaganzas like New York’s Macy’s Parade or Pasadena’s Rose Parade, our Christmas parade is small potatoes, a homegrown and homespun event that will make only the local news.

But here’s the thing: it’s real. It’s up close and personal. The pickups pulling trailers featuring the Grinch or Santa Claus chug slowly past bystanders, who are only a few feet away. Shouts of “Merry Christmas” fill the air without any thought of politically correct speech. The floats and marchers touting local churches and celebrating the birth of Christ certainly wouldn’t make the cut in the big city secular spectacles.

There’s a ragged beauty in this flesh-and-blood pageant. It has elements of a Hallmark Christmas movie, only you’re not watching it secondhand from your living room sofa. You’re a participant, gloriously dropped into the middle of the commotion. You stomp your feet and blow on your hands to fight the cold, watch with delight as the kids scramble for treats, and look for someone you may know, either in the procession or the crowd. From the well-dressed to the scruffy, all sorts of people surround you, reflecting a spirit of fun, pleasure, and pride.

There’s unintended humor as well. This year’s Christmas parade brought some much-needed laughter to me a dozen times in an hour. There was, for instance, someone nearby, clearly a young girl, who kept yelling “Merry Christmas!” as if it were a threat. There was the family – a mom and dad pulling two children in a wagon in the street, unable to do so on the crowded walkways – who were cheered by good-natured onlookers as if they were part of the parade. There was the unenlightened boy on one float who didn’t toss candy to the crowd but hurled it as if pitching a ball game until corrected by the adult in charge.

Tally up these details and countless thousands more, and we find cause for the joy found on the streets of my town that day. A parade had transformed the ordinary into the extraordinary.

And here’s some good news: we don’t need a parade to take a tumble into the magic of the ordinary. Down through history, mystics, poets, and saints have told us again and again of the beauty and wonder to be found in the nitty-gritty of everyday reality if we have only the eyes to see and the ears to hear.

This Christmas season, these metaphysicians of the soul would likely tell us to step away from the digital world we spend so many hours in every day. Catch a coffee with a friend, they might advise, rather than texting back and forth. Go shopping in a brick-and-mortar store rather than ordering all the Yule gifts online. Pay closer attention to the words, wishes, and needs of family members, friends, and strangers.

Do these things with our senses on full alert, keep them and ponder them in our hearts as Mary did in a Bethlehem stable, and we just might find that the ordinary and the commonplace in our lives cradle the deepest and loveliest of all mysteries.

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This article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal. 

Image credit: Unsplash