Williamston Kicks Off Season with First Christmas Parade, Winter Wonderland
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
By late afternoon on Sunday, Williamston quietly remade itself into a Winter Wonderland, the kind of one-day spectacle that small towns are able to pull off while larger cities spend years trying to re-create. The area from town hall to Mineral Springs Park filled with families in winter coats carrying umbrellas, drifting toward the center of town for a compact, carefully arranged celebration that condensed an entire season’s worth of ritual into a single, glittering day.
The Winter Wonderland market set the tempo. Thirty-five vendors filled town hall, their displays and tables forming temporary corridors of light and color, selling baked goods, boutique clothing, handmade jewelry and small-batch crafts that seemed engineered to be both useful and sentimental. Regulars had their favorite stops—returning vendors whose presence each year signaled that the event had taken root, not just as a date on the calendar, but as a recurring appointment in the town’s collective memory.
The day unfolded in a gentle sequence. Families began at the market, weaving through the stalls, buying cookies for now and gifts for later, before drifting toward the curb to claim space along the parade route. The parade, when it arrived, felt less like a performance than a roll call: school groups, church floats, civic clubs and local businesses moving slowly past a crowd that recognized almost every face. After the float carrying Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus disappeared and the noise thinned to a murmur, everyone seemed to turn at once toward the Christmas tree outside town hall. After a lively countdown led by Mayor Rockey Burgess, the lights blinked on right on cue, casting a soft halo over the area, as Williamston friends and neighbors cheered, shoulder to shoulder, framed by the glow and the blowing snowflakes from the snow machines brought in to make the scene almost dreamlike.
Winter Wonderland, for all its carriages and trains and vendors, was ultimately about community: a single day in which an entire town agreed to arrive in the same place, at roughly the same time, and step together into the season.
