Te Puke Christmas Float parade back after year off

The Te Puke Christmas Parade this year has a theme of vehicles - of whatever type.

Last year, illuminated buildings replaced Te Puke's Christmas Float Parade.

This year, we are getting both.

Uncertainty created by the Covid-19 pandemic saw the cancellation of last year's parade.

Keen to ensure Te Puke still celebrated the season as a town, EPIC Te Puke marketing manager Rebecca Larsen created Christmas town - a competition for anyone to decorate their home or commercial building with a Christmas theme.

While the parade can once again go ahead in 2022, the popularity of Christmas Town means it, too, will happen again this year.

"We just loved Te Puke Christmas Town from last year," said Rebecca. "Some people want to a lot of effort and we want to keep that going. We are lucky enough to have sourced some prizes from Mitre 10 to do that."

Rebecca says anyone who is part of a Christmas lights trail can also enter Christmas Town.

The entries will be judged by the public, so anyone entering will be asked to upload photos or videos to the Te Puke Online website, or to YouTube and to provide a link.

The return of the parade means there is also a seat next to Santa up for grabs.
Traditionally, EPIC Te Puke has invited a deserving child to share Santa's sleigh.

"We'd like to give the opportunity to a child who needs a bit of extra Christmas cheer to ride with Santa."

Anyone who knows someone who might be deserving can email details to secretary@epictepuke.co.nz.

The theme of this year's parade is vehicles.

"It's looking really good. We've got some great entries coming through and lots of interesting vehicles coming through, but we are looking for more," said Rebecca.

"We are looking for anything from farms, industry, kiwifruit - anything interesting, even down to, if a group wants to do something like skateboards or scooters or roller skates. Anything goes really."

The idea this year was to keep the theme simple.

"We are coming out of quite a difficult period, but we still want to celebrate Christmas."

The cut-off for entries for the parade is November 25 while entries for Christmas Town can be submitted up to December 10 with a week of public voting to follow.