A parade float built by volunteers from St. Michael Parish in Lyons recently won first place in the village’s annual Peppermint Days Parade, which was held July 15.
St. Michael’s float beat out four or five other floats for top honors and earned $100 in prize money, said Pat Alena, one of more than a dozen volunteers who worked on the float.
The Village of Lyons is celebrating its 175 anniversary this year, so parish volunteers decided the float should have a birthday theme, Alena said. Volunteers designed a large wooden birthday cake, “frosted” the 6-by-6-foot structure with white material, and added large, red-bulbed candles and red trim.
The “cake” was built on a wagon and pulled through the streets of Lyons by a parishioner’s tractor. Seventeen children rode on the float, which sported a stack of wrapped “presents” and signs that read, “St. Michael’s celebrates with Lyons” and “Celebrate Lyons’ 175th.”
This is the second time in recent years that the parish has constructed a float for the Peppermint Days Parade, and the volunteers are so happy with this year’s float that they may enter it in a parade in Clyde this month, Alena said.
Peppermint Days was established in 1989 and is Lyons’ annual celebration of the village’s history. One of Lyons’ most prominent early citizens, Hiram G. Hotchkiss, founded a business that at one time produced one-third of the United States’ supply of peppermint oil, according to the village’s Web site.
