By Ruth Ann Ruiz
The Post Newspaper Features Editor
It was a Christmas parade, a Blue Santa parade, in fact, that rolled down Postoffice Street and onto The Strand in Galveston. However, Blue Santa was hard to spot amid so many other fashionable Christmas treats.
Blue Santa rode on an airboat with his reindeer and his helpers.
There were the marching drill teams with smiles and fluffy pom poms in their hands. There was even a marching band. Of course, with this parade being in Galveston, there also were jeeps, golf carts and bicycles decked out for the season.
Adding to the amusement were floats with dragons and other creatures not often associated with Christmas. Next to these, there were Christmas symbols such as red bows and a replica of Santa. One float, titled Merry Catmas, carried ladies and balloons in green, red and white and other decorative items.
Along with the school-aged drill teams, there were the delightful groups of dancing and strutting krewes that have come to be signature entrants in Galveston’s famous parades.
Most surprising of all were the vehicles. Oh yes, there were fire trucks — two — in fact. But rolling down the streets of Galveston in the middle of the Blue Santa parade also came a big rig, — a semi-truck — in a Christmas parade! Who would have thought? Someone sure did, and the truck and its trailer were shining like two Christmas jewels as though they had just been polished before joining the parade.
In addition to the out-of-the-ordinary big rig, the parade included several vintage cars — not the old-fashioned models you see in other Christmas parades, mind you. Rather, the cars in Galveston’s 2025 Christmas parade seemed to have rolled off assembly lines in the late 1960s and ’70s. The cars also shone. They had most likely been freshly polished and were decked out with Christmas lights and other Christmas décor.
Beads, stuffed animals and candy were thrown out to the thousands of people who came out to witness a Christmas parade that no other place can deliver. On Galveston Island, a Christmas parade seems to make a promise of being out of the ordinary and delivers on the unspoken promise.
