The last Saturday in October is always a busy one—and try as I might, I never seem to make it to the Anaheim Fall Festival, which always lands on that day.
This year, on the 100th year of the parade (but the 101st year of the festival), I finally made it—casting all other plans aside, because you just can't do everything you want to do all the time.
I did make it to the Anaheim Halloween Parade (which takes place after the daytime festival) in 2016, when it was really too dark to get many good photos from my vantage point, and in 2020, when it was just a drive-thru experience because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The good thing about the Festival is that many of those floats you'd see in the parade later on in the evening are part of a daytime stationary display along the Center Street Promenade—where you can right up close to them in broad daylight.
Many of the floats are repurposed year after year, although they're so hand-crafted that I assume they need quite a bit of maintenance before they're ready to be paraded out every October.
Among the local volunteers who make them are a fair number of Disney imagineers and artists—although the designs themselves frequently have vintage roots that far predate the people currently working on them (like the Anaheim Short Line, which has been "riding the rails" since 1948).
In the 1950s and '60s, the parade was so popular that it was televised locally. But then its popularity waned in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s—until Disney art directors Kevin Kidney & Jody Daily ("Kevin & Jody") got involved to help revive and revitalize it in 2012.
In addition to the floats themselves, there are two kind of mascots of the festival and parade: Andy Anaheim, the A-shaped critter who represents the city of Anaheim itself, and the Pumpkin Man, whose cartoonish depiction is usually accompanied by a human portraying him (though I didn't see him in person this year).
And of course there are the vendors (some of which are Disney-level artists and other craftspeople selling illustrations, tiki mugs, pennants, T-shirts, jewelry, confections, and more), the performers, and the dog costume contest.
I hope this little Día de los Muertos guy won.
The festival is all about "wholesome fun" for the whole family—just as it was when it was back in 1923, when the local merchants association created the daytime event as an alternative to too many tricks being played on Halloween, a.k.a. "mischief night."
Back then, Anaheim was just a small, rural community of citrus groves—but as Walt Disney set his sights on the city for the development of his sprawling theme park, so too did The Walt Disney Studios become involved in the Anaheim Fall Festival. And it's continued its involvement for every year that the event has taken place since then—starting in 1953, a full two years before the opening of Disneyland nearby.
Around that same time, Disney gifted the design of "Andy Anaheim" to the city.
In addition to helping promote local businesses, the festival and parade have increasingly become a way to honor our ancestors—particularly for the Mexican American community that has grown in the area. One of the more recently-added highlights to the festival and parade is the Bisabuela ("great grandmother") float.
This event was created over a century ago to keep the kids of Anaheim off the streets—but this year, it brought this Angeleno down to Orange County, with no regrets of what other activities I might've missed out on elsewhere.
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