Silver Bells

This is the part where I stop being so down on Lansing.

Every year Lansing hosts Silver Bells on the Friday before Thanksgiving. It’s a downtown parade that attracts about 90,000 people. That’s almost a third of the “urbanized area” surrounding and including the city. The parade features everything from a fire truck decked out in lights with Santa in the bucket to high school marching bands to a float of a fish made entirely of recycled laundry detergent bottles, individually lighted, with different colors making up different sections of the fish to remind us that everything we pour down the drain ends up swimming with the fishes.

I’ve been volunteering at Silver Bells since I started working in Lansing 9 1/2 years ago. Various buildings in the downtown area serve as warming stations, passing out cookies and cider and hosting children’s craft activities. The Library has served as one of these warming stations.

This year Hubby and I kicked it up a notch working with the Lions Club. Before he joined the Lions all of those community clubs and organizations were one big blur in my mind. Mysterious.  Boring. I’ve really learned a lot since he joined.

One thing I learned is that service organizations do volunteer activities in their communities. It’s pretty much that simple. And they do some cool stuff. One of the Lions in Hubby’s club was instrumental in getting Silver Bells started and has been instrumental in continuing it, and the club volunteers in various aspects of getting-the-parade-started like lining up the floats. My job this year was at the warming station for the floatees. It’s not actually warm, it’s just a tent, but we have coffee, hot chocolate and cookies. We also organized several boy scout troops to carry maybe 25 banners at intervals.

After the parade – this is where it gets weird for me – we were invited to the afterglow at the Lansing Center. The mayor came up to our table and thanked us for our work while we ate cute ors d’oeuvres. I don’t consider myself a meeting-the-mayor kind of woman.

In college I worked against the flow – imagining myself on the outside looking in, considering  myself a radical in the easy, lazy days of Clinton’s presidency, my ideas slightly to the left of Marx (that’s a song lyric, actually), working for my community in a non-establishment kind of way. And that was all good, I’m proud of what I did. But I’m starting to be proud of what I do now, too. I have a better appreciation for how my community works and the people here who work within it. And to feel some pride in my town.

I listen to country music, I get my news from The Daily Show, I write my own knitting patterns, and I live in Lansing. It’s nice to meet you.