No Christmas Parade in 2020

As if 2020 couldn’t get worse, the City of East Ridge cancelled this year’s Christmas Parade on Tuesday.

Officials released a statement saying the parade would be cancelled due to a “low number of applications received, presumably due to COVID-19.”

A new single-day record of positive COVID-19 cases (260) were reported on Tuesday by the Hamilton County Health Department.

City officials said that only 13 applications had been received from organizations wishing to participate. Last year there were 65 different entities represented in the parade which winds down Ringgold Road from Germantown Road to Tombras Avenue.

The parade _ the first Christmas parade of the season in the entire region _ was scheduled on its traditional date, the Saturday before Thanksgiving, which this year falls on Nov. 21. The Christmas parade has been a city tradition since the 1980s.

In 2017 city officials cancelled the parade due to the threat of storms. Not to be denied, local businesses, in conjunction with the City of East Ridge, put on an abbreviated parade at Camp Jordan Park on December 9.

In a Tuesday press release, city officials thanked all the people who support the parade and hope to have “another great edition for everyone in 2021.”

About Dick Cook

Dick Cook has lived in East Ridge since the Kennedy Administration when his parents bought a house on Marietta Street. Dick graduated from ERHS in 1976 before going on to the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga where he studied Political Science. Dick worked for the Chattanooga Free-Press and the Chattanooga Times Free Press for 22 years. Free-Press Sports Editor Roy Exum plucked him out of production in 1989 and gave him a job as a sports reporter. Dick covered everything from prep sports to the whitewater events on the Ocoee River for the 1996 Olympics. When Chattanooga's two paper's merged, he became the Crime Reporter covering both the Chattanooga Police and Fire Departments. He was among reporters who were honored by the Associated Press for the TFP's coverage of the 2002 fog-shrouded crash on I-75 in Catoosa County, Dick and his wife, Cathy, live on Marlboro Avenue where they are seen frequently chasing around their three grandsons.