Ida — If you asked what Michigan’s party town is, most would answer Ann Arbor. But their idea of partying is getting stoned on suede couches in Victorian fraternity houses. The rest of the state, to their minds, is nothing but cornfields and ice.
These people don’t know about Ida, Southeast Michigan’s party town. Unlike Ann Arbor, Ida doesn’t parade down Main Street with its men in skirts and women in cat costumes, waving rainbow flags through puffs of pot.
Instead, Ida celebrates Christmas.
The annual Christmas festival and parade of lights takes place the first weekend of December. It started in 1982 as a craft show, a three-unit parade, and a Christmas lunch with Santa. That first parade involved a firetruck, the high school band, and Santa riding a horse drawn wagon.
This December was the festival’s 43rd anniversary, and 48,000 visitors attended. Food trucks lined Lewis Avenue, live music went on all weekend, and Monroe County’s largest indoor craft show took place. The capstone event was the parade of lights, featuring over 135 parade units covered in thousands of lights.
The parade included floats, bands, marching groups, fire trucks, and more. Ohio, Indiana, Missouri, Wisconsin, and Michigan were all the states represented in the parade. Even some Canadians showed up.
Past parades have included flamethrowers, an animatronic eagle with a 30-foot wingspan, airplanes, trains, Booboo Stewart, and Restless Heart.
Some may wonder how Ida attracts five states, Canada, as well as bands from as far as South America.
Ida township’s population is about 4,800. Ida proper, where the festival takes place, has about 700 residents. But this past December 4 to 6, Ida momentarily had the population of East Lansing. Why?
Give credit to the Zorns. Dale and Cindy, who were the festival’s Mr. and Mrs. Clause until recently, have led the event since its beginning. In its early years, the parade was during the day and featured farming equipment, mostly. But in 1998, the Zorns moved the parade to the evening, thereby making it a parade of lights. After that decision, the festival grew exponentially. Now this international event needs about 1,800 volunteers to function.
When I visit Ida outside of the first weekend in December, I find it a sleepy town. Other than the Ida Tavern and the Blue Streak, there is little happening, no different from Erie or Petersburg. It is a small farm town with patches of woods and cornfields stretching for miles in every direction. But that’s its charm.
Ida is proud to be the Christmas town. The houses are better decorated for the season than any other Michigan neighborhood I’ve seen. The businesses deck themselves in lights, and by the time the festival begins, the town is bursting with children. And this is what Ida remembers.
There are people living in what are thought to be the most beautiful regions of Michigan who are unhappy. They are looking out from their log cabins on to Lake Charlevoix, or from their upper-floor apartments onto Grand Rapids, bored.
But as Christmas comes to us Michiganders, we should remember the words of a man who may have loved Christmas more than any other man. G. K. Chesterton once said, “There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.”
Dale Zorn’s vision for Christmas in Ida, his refusal to see this place as a boring little town, reveals that even an iota of ambition creates an event that blesses thousands. Such love or zeal for anything is rare at this time.
Christmas in Ida is full of interested people who love seemingly “common” blessings. They love the carols and the lights and the cramming of 48,000 people into a small town, because they see the abundance around them.
Noah Wing is a contributing writer for Michigan Enjoyer.
