We were among the last homes in our neighborhood to get a television set when I was a child. Once we had a television, however, my father thought that it was an intriguing technology. So just a couple of years after a used black and white set made its way into our home, my dad was at work on a Heathkit color television. I had never seen color television. The kit arrived around Christmas time, which was a great time in our family’s life. The work at the shop slowed at the end of the year. Our dad’s birthday was between Christmas and New Years and we usually had a week that focused on family and fun. There were often adventures in the outdoors and most years a trip to one of the area’s hot springs was part of the winter fun. This year dad was engaged for several days with his soldering iron and several muffin tins of small parts as he patiently assembled circuit boards and put together the set. The picture tube was enormous and it was apparent that this was going to be a major fixture in our living room.

The set was ready for viewing on New Year’s Day. We all stood or sat around as dad made some final adjustments and there it was! The Rose Bowl parade right in our living room in color! Now it wasn’t exactly high-definition. We would be very disappointed with that picture if it were the best we could do with our modern television sets. And the set was probably 19” diagonally, which isn’t big by today’s standards. But I had never seen a color television set before. The colors weren’t brilliant, a bit muted. I remember that orange and green seemed to be a bit more common than the other colors. In a way it was a bit like black and whit television, but with a pale green replacing the white and a dark orange replacing the black. But there were a few other noticeable colors.

We spend the morning marveling at the Rose Bowl Parade. We kept commenting on the bright colors, the lovely floats, all of the flowers and the splendor and pageantry of it all. It was, for us, an amazing parade. We got to see other big parades on that television. I remember Macy’s Thanksgiving Parades and the Rose Bowl Parades best of all. We didn’t have big parades in our town. In the first place we didn’t have a very big main street, so sometimes the parades made a circle around the park and came back the other way. Our house was on Main Street and always on the parade route, so we watched them all. I marched in most of the parades once I got into high school. Our high school band was the only marching band in town. The Memorial Day parades got a bit sad as the World War I veterans aged. They lost the ability to march in step and sometimes their lines wandered. We didn’t have that many to start with, so each time one died we noticed the loss. Then one day the World War II veterans stepped in and started carrying the colors and the remaining World War I veterans all fit in the back seats of two convertibles, which was about all of the convertibles in town. Our big parade was the annual Rodeo Parade, which despite the religious convictions of the town was held on a Sunday. We’d rush off to church, which had been moved to an earlier hour and then rush back home. It was only two blocks and we still had most of an hour to wait for the beginning of the parade.

Our shop always had a “float” in the parade, even if they rarely floated. We’d hang some crape paper streamers on a delivery truck and paint a few plywood signs. Sometimes we’d decorate the largest tractor or implement we had at the shop. My dad loved the challenge of trying to fit something big down Main Street. One year, when I was young we towed an airplane in the parade and I rode on a saddle on the tail. One year we did a very similar float with a Land Leveler pulled by a 4020 John Deere. One of my brothers rode the saddle that time. A third brother got to ride the saddle around a barrel attached to the three-point hitch on a tractor what went up and down during the parade. It wasn’t a very wild ride. You get the idea.

No matter how hard we tried, we never had a parade with all of the fresh flowers and “real” floats like the Rose Bowl. We never saw giant balloons like the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in our town.

Palm Sunday at our church didn’t qualify as a parade in the first place. We didn’t have a color guard. There was no parade marshal. The best we could muster was a donkey, which put us a step up over the other churches in town because our family was the only one in town that bred donkeys. Sometimes the Lutherans would come up with a brand new horse colt, but we always had a genuine Spanish burro with the cross on the shoulders that was proof that Jesus had ridden that specific breed of donkey. At least that’s the line I used when bragging about the creatures. Our dad did try to breed so that there would be a fresh cold for Palm Sunday, but the timing was less than precise and some years all we had was a pregnant mare as we waited for the colt that was coming too late. We’d lead the animal around the front of the church. That was about it.

In the back of my head I knew there were bigger parades.

That’s how it was for Jesus, too. The Romans knew how to put on a spectacular show with their White Stallions and bright chariots. They knew how to impress the people with rank upon rank of soldiers with swords and shields. Jesus, by comparison, came into town on a small donkey, barely able to handle his weight. The people didn’t have much for decorations. They threw a few coats and some branches from the trees on the street ahead of Jesus. I’m sure that the government officials and church leaders scoffed at the pitiful little parade.

But the world was to learn that the size of the parade doesn’t determine the length of the impact. Those who were anticipating the Messiah to come in the world’s terms with military might discovered a power that is much stronger. It is love. And love never dies.

Love doesn’t demand the biggest parade around.

Copyright © 2013 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.