This Thursday, the 75th San Benito County Saddle Horse Show Parade and Fiesta will take place in downtown Hollister.
I've been musing about tradition a lot, and the Horse Show Parade is one of my favorite traditions. It captures all the excitement of the upcoming Saddle Horse Show & Rodeo while being accessible to anyone who can get to San Benito Street by 6 Thursday evening.
Of course, it's better to get there earlier to find a good place for your lawn chair, but it won't kill you to stand up for the duration of the parade.
Not only does it not last terribly long, but there also aren't any elaborate floats decorated with millions of flower petals, nor any giant balloons threatening to break loose and impale themselves on a skyscraper, as in bigger parades in bigger cities.
There are floats, of course, and they are decorated, often with crepe paper or construction paper and the distinctive lettering style of enthusiastic fifth-graders with large markers.
Hay bales play an important role in the structure of many floats, creating a perfect bleacher arrangement for the entire population of various preschools.
This is a Saddle Horse Show Parade, so it's only natural that some of the most exciting entrants are the equestrians - the search and rescue unit, for example, the brave volunteers who use their horseback skills to go into the brush to extricate the lost or injured.
Often various politicians or dignitaries will also put in an appearance on horseback, as if to claim their fair share of San Benito authenticity.
But the best horse entries are the vaqueros such as the Charros Los Amigos, whose horsemanship rivals their costumes for flair and who serve as a grand reminder of where cowboy traditions originated.
And the bands. The bands and their accompaniments, drill teams, color guards, majorettes, add a thrilling dose of pageantry and rhythm to every parade. Sometimes, in addition to the bands, other performance groups such as the San Benito Stage Company will offer a sample from a current program.
The folks on the sidelines are worth observing, too: the little ones seeing horses up close for the first time; the big kids who were little ones just yesterday but are now more interested in what their friends are doing than what's going by on the street.
I will be there, watching, happy, thinking about how it may be called the Saddle Horse Show Parade, but it's really the people that make it wonderful.
Elizabeth Gage Elizabeth Gage writes a weekly column every Thursday in the Hollister Free Lance
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Students warm up for school
