Went for our annual Thanksgiving tractor/wagon ride with my family yesterday and the entire time it made me incredibly excited about the next time I’ll be riding with that wagon – The Cambridge Santa Claus Parade.

In years past, I (along with some friends that I have met through twitter) have organized a breakfast for people to wear their sweaters, awesome, epic and ugly to a breakfast. This was initially born out of the idea that many of my tweetpeeps have children and spouses and due to the nature of the majority of the events we’d get together, we wouldn’t get to meet them unless it was in passing at the grocery store or the Cambridge Centre for the Arts.

The #sweaterbreakfast was born for a smaller group of people to get together and share some of the holiday cheer. I always included some activities for the kids (colouring pages done thanks to Kristina for instance). I’d do up little grab bags for each of the kids and some of the adults and everyone would get a candy cane.

We’ve had so much fun with it, that people in our group have made finding the most epic sweater a year long challenge, always searching through thrift stores to find just the perfect one. This year, the talk started in August on a fairly cold night when we all started looking ahead to fall and ultimately to the holidays. And so it came to be on a dark night in Galt at the Kiwi patio that the idea of actually upping the ante and putting a float into the Santa Claus parade was born.

Initially, it was a bit of a “Wouldn’t it be cool if we could do that?”
And then it became “Well why don’t we look into it to see if it can be done and how much it costs?”
And ultimately I found myself saying “My dad has agreed to let us use his tractor and wagon along with his generator so that we can have lights. Can other families chip in a bit of money to cover the entry cost for the parade?”

And so our dream was born. The deadline is looming but more and more I’m getting excited by my ideas for the Ugly Sweater Society of Cambridge to show off our stuff. We have our first team meeting this Friday night, at the Kiwi of course, which has become our central location for the breakfast this year as well as a meeting ground. We have a lot of the old crew coming back from last year, as nearly everyone that was at the breakfast is stoked to be involved. We need to come up with a game plan and numbers because as soon as word got out that we were doing this, more and more voices spoke up wanting in.

I’m leaving it all open to everyone, but space on the float will be limited as there is only space for 16 seats comfortably. Of course if those buns are smaller, we can probably squeeze in more kids. It means also that many of us adults will need to walk the route, which is the longest Santa Claus parade in Canada. See this is the size of the float:

I have ideas for decorating and if everyone can chip in a little bit here and there we might be able to pull this off. If we can pull this off, it’s going to be awesome. Wait, not if, WHEN we pull this off.

Oh yes folks. When I set my quirky mind to something, I can make it happen. And if I can’t, there are many friends I can lean on to make sure that we follow through with this.

Visit the website: http://uglysweaters.ca and more details will be added as time goes on.

If this sounds like fun and you want to be involved in planning or just want to walk with us or dine with us, please drop me a line. We’d love to have you!