By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
No road construction held up the Polar Express on the way to its next destination, Bowling Green.
The only pauses in the city’s annual holiday parade came as dancers, twirlers, singers, and musicians stopped at the Four Corners to perform for the TV audience watching live on WTOL.
The scarcity of traffic cones was as welcomed a sight to residents and especially downtown businesses as the arrival of Santa Claus.
No one is happier to see the end of two years of downtown road and utility construction than the four women serving as honorary grand marshals for the parade.
Stacie Banfield, Gayle Walterbach, Kati Thompson, and Laura Wicks are the four downtown business owners who got together two years ago and launched Firefly Nights, summer and fall series of festivals that brought people downtown for kids activities, food, shopping, and music.
This year the construction forced the relocation of two of the four festivals from Main Street to Church Street. That cost the downtown shops the bump in business the events provide.
Now the quartet was riding along a smooth freshly paved Main Street with visions of a bustling holiday season to close out a troubled year on a high note.
Walterbach, of Coyote Beads, said they were surprised to be honored. “We’ve worked really hard to bring our community together. Working with a great team of volunteers has been really rewarding.”
“We are so thankful for the support of each and every person that has helped make it a success, including our committee leaders and numerous volunteers that make it all possible,” Banfield, of Mode Elle Boutique, wrote in a text message.
Even with the July and August festivals relocated, they still served to bring people together, said Wicks, of Grounds for Thought.
Those festivals also “opened people’s eyes to what is possible for the green space.”
Walterbach said now they are looking forward to the holiday season. “We have a really beautiful downtown,” she said. “I was overhearing a couple who’d come into my store from out of town and they said: ‘This is a little Hallmark town.’ They were recognizing it. It really is that way.
“It made me stop to think. We just need to move forward and recognize we have a beautiful downtown and love having our community come together.”
Wicks said she’s concerned shoppers’ habits of doing business downtown, “probably have changed with all the construction downtown. It would be good for everyone to remember to come downtown and shop downtown.”
“We really need people to shop local,” Walterbach said. “We really do.”
Another local business proprietor Amy Craft Ahrens was not in the parade’s line of march. Instead she was walking along the sidewalk handing out gift certificates for her shop For Keeps.
She was pleased to see the Firefly organizers, with whom she worked, get recognized. It shows that there are business owners, many of them women, who are working to foster a prosperous business district, she said.
“There is just something about the holidays that ignites a spark inside of people,” Banfield said. “One that brings a sense of peace, love, joy and kindness to our community. And it’s a very welcoming feeling after all of the hardships our downtown businesses have faced these past few years.”
But even as the holiday season swings into gear, Walterbach was looking forward to next summer and “another Firefly season and continuing making it special for our community.”
