Deck the Fire Truck with Boughs of Holly

In Sweden they dress up as martyrs at Christmas and wear flaming crowns, in the Netherlands they eat candy out of unfashionable shoes, and in small town America, they decorate fire engines. I have two comments:

1. Small town America is no weirder than anywhere else.
2. Small town America WINS. Fire trucks are AWESOME and they are even more AWESOME when they are decorated with Christmas lights and electronic moving reindeer and REAL LIVESTOCK!

Having never lived in the center of town before, and my parents having apparently kept this a secret because it is too good to share, I had no idea that every year, a couple of weeks before Christmas, the fire departments from various surrounding towns compete to see who can decorate their fire truck the AWESOMEST and then they drive them through town so that we village folk can be mightily impressed by their decorative skills and/or total lack of subtlety. Which we were. Fa la la la la la la la la!

But I am not here to make fun of them. Because I honestly thought this was the best parade I have seen in a long time. Look! Fire trucks! With lights!


And! There's more! Firemen dressed up in lights! You might ask yourself, isn't that a fire hazard? But no! It isn't! Because there are fifteen firetrucks within a half-mile!


And here's one of them! And it's so pretty! Just imagine if your house was burning down and this showed up! You'd be so happy, you'd forget that all your worldly possession were in ashes!


However. There is a line. And if I were having a heart attack and my rescuers arrived in this, I think, if I could manage it, I would say, "I will not allow you to take me to the hospital unless you take those ridiculous animals off the roof of your vehicle. This is not a Wagnerian opera!"


When the parade was over, there were a vast number of fire trucks lining Monroe Street, and a vast number of people who were annoyed because they wanted to use Monroe Street, and there was a very immobile fire truck parked across the end of it blocking it off. It was like having royalty in town. Royalty that could plug themselves in and light up like toys!

Happily, a nice fireman let me out of the street because I needed to go grocery shopping because this:


was due to arrive imminently, and in fact snow began to fall at almost the exact moment that the parade ended. It was not the deadly horror that newscasters gleefully predicted, but it was cold enough and windy enough and snowy enough that I only took two pictures before going back inside to have another can of soup. Here is the other picture:


Isn't that lovely? And just twelve hours earlier, there were firetrucks rolling through town like vehicular Christmas trees. This is a great place to live.