For the first time since the end of World War II, there will not be a Christmas parade in downtown Hot Springs due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Despite receiving approval from the Arkansas Department of Health and the city of Hot Springs, the parade's sponsor, Oaklawn Rotary Club, decided on Monday to cancel the annual parade for this year to prevent a spike in local coronavirus cases.
Having started in 1939, the only other time the Christmas parade has been canceled in Garland County history was during World War II, from 1942-1946. The parade has been held yearly since 1947.
Oaklawn Rotary Club President Scott Burton said the club's original plan for this year's parade was to encourage social distancing and masking but concluded it would be "too difficult" to enforce among the crowd.
"You just never know what's going to happen, and we thought that the risk was greater than the reward would have been, so that's what we decided to go ahead and do," Burton said of the cancellation. "With that being said, we are looking for an alternative and we had the idea of doing a Christmas Tree Decorating Contest."
The specifics of the Christmas Tree Decorating Contest are still in the works, but it would be a public event throughout November and December, where trees would be entered in the contest throughout November, and displayed at a central location throughout December for the public to vote on. Trees will be auctioned off before Christmas Day.
The club will announce the contest's full details at a later date.
"We are just as disappointed as everybody else is, that it's not going to happen this year. We just felt like the safety of the Hot Springs community is priority number one," Burton said. "We're looking for a great alternative to the Christmas parade ... it's going to be festive, it's going to give that same holiday feel that just doesn't put out the same risk as the actual parade."
According to Clay Farrar, who has written a monthly column, "The Amateur Historian," for The Sentinel-Record, the first downtown Christmas parade was held on Nov. 23, 1939.
"The mile-long parade was made up of 15 floats, 200 National Guardsmen in uniform, two school marching bands, and an official car carrying the Hot Springs mayor and other local dignitaries," Farrar said in a column published in 2018.
"The third Christmas Parade was held on Nov. 20, 1941, only two weeks before the surprise attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7. Since the local National Guard unit had already been called into active service, the military was represented by two platoons of uniformed soldiers from the Army-Navy Hospital. The Sentinel-Record described the parade as having a 'somber note of national defense ... and a martial theme evident in the decoration motifs of many of the floats.' Ominously, one headline described the holiday as a 'Not so Merry Christmas.'"
The 1941 Christmas parade was to be the last Christmas Parade to be held for the next five years because of the American involvement in World War II, Farrar said.
"The annual Christmas parade was resumed in November 1947. The 1947 parade grew to include 27 floats and five bands including for the first time the Langston High School Drum and Bugle Corps and the Army-Navy Hospital Band. The crowd viewing the parade was estimated to be 20,000 and stood 10 deep on downtown sidewalks. This was believed to be the largest crowd ever to attend a local parade. Annual Christmas parades have been held every year since to the delight of tens of thousands of local children and their parents," he said.