1 week Ago
LANCASTER, N.Y. — For our Most Buffalo Story of the Day, we went to the Village of Lancaster where, every year to the delight of big crowds, hundreds of trucks are driven in the Christmasville Fire Truck parade.
On Friday morning, 2 On Your Side talked with one of the men who makes it happen. "We had an idea, Tommy and I, let's have a fire truck parade to promote for the community for Christmas and fire trucks themed up with Christmas lights , and we decided that we're going to have a parade, and it just grew from there," parade co-chair Jerry Enser said. It certainly did.
The Christmasville Fire Truck Parade in Lancaster started with 19 trucks in 2007. Now it has more than 200. "You put my two favorite things together.
Christmas lights and fire trucks. You put them together, and you just have a warm feeling," Enser said. We met up with parade co-chair and Greater Lancaster Museum of Firefighting President Jerry Enser at the museum Friday morning to talk about this year's parade.
It's Saturday, Nov. 30 at 6 p.m.
So far, trucks from seven counties are signed up. "You can see whatever creativity that they came up with for the year. So I have no idea what they create until they are on the street, and then they say, wow, that's pretty cool what they just did," Enser said.
Enser says the themes are kept a secret until parade day because it's a competition. "We have seen somebody that had the Minnie Mouse and Mickey Mouse-themed, we've seen a lot of Grinch themes, we have seen Baby Shark themes, whatever the popular movie of the year, coming up, a lot of them do that, they do a lot of Bills themes," Enser said. It takes two hours to see all 200 trucks go by.
The parade starts at Lancaster High School, goes south on Central Avenue to the Village of Lancaster, and Enser says the trucks turn right on West Main Street and go past the fire museum. It takes a committee of about twenty people to pull this off. We asked Enser if he ever dreamed the parade would get this big.
"Not in a million years. You know, we were told a few years ago that the International Space Station was able to actually see it, which was kind of cool that they were able to see from up on top of this parade," Enser said. There is still time to enter.
You do not have to be a fire department in New York. They've had trucks from Canada in the parade before. "Some of the things that awe me is, like, they came from that distance to come in to our Village of Lancaster to be in a parade," Enser said.
.
