Parade coordinator Rod Allen said the parade has been going strong now for the past 20 years.“I’m not sure how it started, but it used to be a bunch of truckers who just got together and drove from Eureka to Arcata down Highway 101 and looped back around down Samoa Boulevard. They called it ‘Truckers Christmas Convoy.’ It was something to see coming over the bridges from Samoa, but it got too big — the rigs got too elaborate — and in the late ‘80s or early ‘90s the CHP said it was no longer street legal. Ever since that time it’s been a parade route through Eureka, beginning at Redwood Acres.”
Longtime day-of-the-parade coordinator Dale Bridges has been working the parade for the past 17 years and said the whole thing actually began with a peanut.“In 1978, during the Carter administration, when restrictions were being put on logging, a group of loggers carved a peanut out of a redwood tree and took it by logging truck to Washington, D.C., to protest,” Bridges explained. “When they brought it back to town it was Christmastime and loggers drove their trucks behind it through town. That’s what started the whole thing.”
Special thanks go out to Lowel and Sandy Randstrom for putting on a wonderful Holiday spread at their home on Harris.
