Welcome to the Chesapeake Rotary Christmas Parade! We are a Parade for all of Chesapeake -- and remain dedicated to our "small town" parade atmosphere. Each year, the Club reviews nearly 150 applications for floats, bands, equestrian and other animal groups, and performance groups for selection to fill a limited number of positions in the one-hour parade. Rain or shine (or snow!), the Parade gets underway on the first Saturday each December. What is now the Chesapeake Christmas Parade began over 40 years ago with the Great Bridge Jaycees organization. For many of those years, local citizen Renee Leftwich volunteered to organize the event. In 2010, with declining Jaycee membership, two of our Rotary Club’s Past Presidents, Ray Conner and David Hanson, worked with the City Manager and the remaining Jaycees for the Chesapeake Rotary Club to assume the roles of lead Sponsor and Organizer of the annual event. The parade name officially changed to the Chesapeake Rotary Christmas Parade in 2010. Rotarians Will Langford and Anthony Draper set to work creating the Parade in its present format. On December 4th, 2010, the inaugural Chesapeake Rotary Christmas Parade marched through downtown Great Bridge before over 5,000 spectators -- and was even blessed with a little snow. Our Club received newspaper, radio, and television coverage for taking-over the task of organizing the event. The Parade was broadcast live on WCTV, and rebroadcast nearly daily throughout the remainder of the holiday season on COX 48; it remains available as an archived broadcast at WCTV’s website. WCTV will be the broadcast the 2022 Parade --- an event that now attracts an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 spectators and participants to Great Bridge. Rotarian Dianne Copeland Adcock joined Anthony Draper and Mike Love in planning the annual Parade in 2012. A tour de force in the local dance and parade community -- and at Disney World -- Dianne remained involved in planning our Parade until her untimely passing in May 2020. In the absence of Dianne and due to then-ongoing COVID social distancing restrictions, Chesapeake Rotary made the difficult decision to cancel the 2020 parade. The 2021 Chesapeake Rotary Christmas Parade was co-chaired by Rotarians Lindsey Riddle Elliott and Anthony Draper with the assistance of Shirley Turner (Dianne Adcock’s daughter, and recent addition to the Chesapeake Rotary family). Lindsey and Shirley co-chair our 2022 Parade, with assistance from first-year Rotarian Paul Tatum. Chesapeake Rotary adopted this event as a fundraiser for our Chesapeake Rotary Foundation. The Chesapeake Rotary Foundation provides grants to individuals and organizations involved in service projects that benefit our Chesapeake residents (an application is available at our Chesapeake Rotary website). We attribute much of our Parade's success to Chesapeake Regional, which has been the presenting sponsor of the Parade since 2013. We are extremely appreciative for having Chesapeake Regional Healthcare as a Parade partner. We look forward to seeing you on Saturday, December 3rd, 2022! See more at: http://www.chesapeakechristmasparade.com
