Mpls Downtown Improvement District

Captain Hook gets plugged into a battery pack and lights up like a Vegas hotel. A giant snowman impersonating star Twins catcher Joe Mauer begins spinning. Little kids in mouse costumes scamper about. In the darkness of a Minneapolis winter evening, a parade is getting underway.

It's called Holidazzle (or more precisely, Target Holidazzle--the locally based retail giant has been a major sponsor since 2008)--and if its original impetus was to lure shoppers to downtown Minneapolis and encourage them to stick around after sunset in the holiday season, it's evolved into a truly beloved holiday tradition in our towns. It's been lighting up Nicollet Mall for 19 years with the energy of hundreds of volunteers and workers, and while visitors from all over Minnesota and the four states that surround it are drawn to the (literally) sparkling event, many of the people who make it happen are less visible.

"The number of volunteers and people working on the parade is pretty staggering, and that's something I don't think people realize," says Leah Wong, Minneapolis Downtown Council vice president of events and marketing. Wong oversees many aspects of the parade, which runs Thursday through Sunday evenings from Nov. 26 through Dec. 19. (The mega-blizzard that dumped close to two feet of snow on the city led to the cancellation of last Saturday's outing, but the parade will be back up and running this weekend.)

Mice and Drummers and Lights

If you're looking, you can spot some of the 300 nightly volunteers and other workers on the parade route. By 5:30 p.m. the skyways are filled with parade watchers. Outside on the Mall, many families and couples have already staked out spots on curbs or in heated tents, while some are huddling in blanket-wrapped clumps.

Although the parade won't start for an hour, Ann Ruehling has been busy for some time at the Hyatt Regency Hotel near 13th Street, welcoming volunteers who will play parade characters and shepherding them into the areas where they'll get into their costumes. She checks them off on her list and sends them to different parts of a big room to be fitted, to get into harnesses, or to get battery packs attached--while calming nervous children and giving instructions.

"We really try and assure everybody they're going to have a great time," says Ruehling, an independent event consultant who's volunteered at the parade for 15 years. Of course, there are crises in the suiting-up period. Volunteers can turn claustrophobic inside their rigs and the costumes don't always fit. It helps to be flexible, says Ruehling. The best part, she adds, is seeing kids get excited about their characters.

Outside on the Mall at 12th street as the parade is about to start, a colony of juvenile Nutcracker mice form a chain by holding each others' tails. Drummers dressed as toy soldiers are asked about their costumes, "Are you all lit up?" They snicker. "No, that's after the gig." Behind them, giant spinning figures called doodlebugs float out into formation: a nutcracker and that Joe Mauer snowman,

Setting the Pace

Cross traffic isn't blocked during Holidazzle, but stoplights on Nicollet Mall are timed so the parade will flow smoothly as long as it stays on pace, and Randy Barreto's job is to make sure that it does.

As coordinator of the parade's eighteen pacers, he gets people harnessed into the biggest, bulkiest costume elements and walks along the route, keeping an eye on characters, marching units, and floats as they go down the street, to keep them on pace and make sure the parade stays on time. Pacers direct float drivers and some of the costumed characters who have limited visibility, while also making sure that children don't run into the parade path.

A project coordinator by day, Barreto has worked most parade nights for the past eighteen years. His motivator? The kids. "It's the faces of the kids as you walk down the street, and the screaming and the cheering," he says.

Barreto's done the parade in shorts, and he's done it when it was 25 below, and according to him no two nights are the same. "We run this every night, basically two hours of getting them dressed, down the street and back," he said. "It goes so smoothly but yet there's so much going on that I call it organized chaos."

The Hook

Near Ninth Street, vendors sell everything from hot chocolate and chestnuts to illuminated toys. Everywhere, parents' shoulders offer the best viewing perspective for diminutive parade watchers.

On the deck of a gaudy pirate-ship float, Scott Weatherby, dressed as Captain Hook, hams it up in pirate talk. By the end of the parade, he's been "aarrgh"-ing so much that he's hoarse.

"The first time I did it, it was kind of surreal," says Weatherby, Xcel Energy vice president and chief audit executive, who's volunteered as the character for the past five years. "It seemed to go by in just a couple minutes but it [really] takes more than half an hour.…There are people on both sides of the street, up in the skyways, ahead of you and behind you, and [you need] to always be looking around and waving to folks because the people, especially the ones that aren't close, get a kick out of realizing that you're making an effort to wave to them.....The little kids on the parade route really are fired up about it,"

Mock-sinister, he invites kids to join his crew. The younger ones look like they're afraid he's serious, but an older boy once took him up on his offer and tried to climb onto the float, he says.

Weatherby has been coming to Target Holidazzle since his two children were small. Not far from him, his son Connor, a sophomore at Bloomington Jefferson High School. is dressed as Robin Hood. In the past five years, he's been a variety of characters, including Hook's nemesis from Peter Pan, the crocodile. The parade has become a tradition for many families and among several generations, says Leah Wong, who estimates that 300,000 people will see the parade this year. "We see a lot of people coming out who came with their families when they were children and now they have kids of their own and they're continuing the tradition."

After the parade climaxes with Santa Claus on the final float at 4th Street, the crowd disperses to the music of a busking drummer and flute player. Parade volunteers drop off their oversize character heads and board a bus back to the Hyatt as the blue-jacketed Minneapolis Downtown Improvement District workers clean up the emptying mall. The hard-working volunteers that make Holidazzle happen return to day jobs and school--until it's time to make the Minnesota holiday winter night bright again.