The traditional start of winter revelry in the Pascack Valley is the annual Westwood Home for the Holidays, with its parade, dance performances, cider, hot cocoa, donuts, giveaways, and Santa Claus’s arrival atop a fire truck.
This year’s Home for the Holidays, Saturday, Dec. 7 at 6 p.m., kicks off from Five Corners (Kinderkamack and Westwood Avenue) rain or shine—or snow.
An estimated 35 organizations are expected to participate in the theme of “Home for the Holidays: 125 years of Celebration.”
The Westwood Free Public Library, celebrating 100 years in 2019, invites families in after hours for a pre-parade celebration, a gift of the Friends of the Westwood Library. At 5 p.m. the Westwood Regional Jr./Sr. High School Choir performs. After that Mrs. Claus arrives for stories, crafts, hot chocolate, and cookies.
Home for the Holidays sponsors include Hackensack Meridian Health Pascack Valley Medical Center, Westwood Chamber of Commerce, the Borough of Westwood, and Pascack Press.
In addition to its floats and costumed revelers, Home for the Holidays this year is set off by a collectible Celebrate Westwood 125th anniversary ornament, available at the library and select merchants for $10.
Happy anniversary, Westwood!
Not just the borough, but also the Volunteer Fire Department celebrates 125 years this year. And it was the Volunteer Fire Department that in the 1950s inaugurated what we know today as Home for the Holidays, when it conveyed Santa to the then newly opened Pascack Valley Hospital to visit with young patients. The event started taking Santa as well to the park bandstand to hand out candy canes and to hear kiddos’ gift requests.
The tradition filled out into the 1970s and 1980s with Chamber of Commerce and borough assistance, including the tree lighting, and is akin to a Nantucket stroll, with shops inviting locals in for preseason hospitality. Afterward, families typically go home and host their own holiday parties. (This year, the Celebrate Westwood Committee plans an after party as well.)
This is a remarkable year for the borough and for many other communities in Bergen County, which have been marking anniversaries of late.
As Celebrate Westwood has been so warmly observing, 2019 is the centennial not just of the library but also of the Westwood Women’s Club, the 130th anniversary of St. Andrew’s Church, the 115th anniversary of Grace Episcopal Church, the 120th year of Temple Lodge #173 Free and Accepted Masons, the 80th year of Temple Assembly #32 International Organization of Rainbow Girls, and the 30th anniversary of the Westwood Heritage Society.
It was the 10th anniversary of Taste of Westwood, a fundraiser for the Friends of the Library.
What to expect
The evening and night of Dec. 7, Westwood Avenue all the way up and around Veterans Memorial Park’s bandstand and to the nearby library will glow with holiday magic.
There’ll be pre-parade performances by local dance academies, live music, marching bands, costumed characters, trackless train rides, a D.J., and the gift of glow sticks.
With Westwood Avenue closed to traffic, parking is at the municipal lots. By 5:30, steer clear of Kinderkamack Road at Five Corners, which will be closed to through traffic.
Chamber board member Mike Fitzsimmons, who organizes the event among a handful of borough boosters, recommends, “Get here early, do some shopping, get your prime position, and stay for the duration.”
Fitzsimmons told Pascack Press last week that everything is free on Home For the Holidays, with an exception made by law for some veterans fundraising.
“We try to focus on our audience: kids 3–10. We try to make everything at their level so that they understand, that they get it right away, and that it’s fun and appropriate,” he said.
Last year’s parade was a who’s who of the Pascack Valley, from scouts to schools to bands to churches to businesses to the Bergen County Sheriff’s Office Mounted Unit. He said this year’s lineup was being finalized.
“I don’t know that we’ll have anybody doing any sort of a Victorian Christmas, but you can look at it in terms of what the popular culture was like, and how they would celebrate Christmas back then, so you could go back to Dickens or ‘A Christmas Carol,’” Fitzsimmons said.
“If you’re going to go whole hog on that and you’re an organization, then yeah, you’re going to get in—because you’ve gone to the effort,” he added.
Fitzsimmons said the groups that typically put the most work into their displays are “easily the Girl Scout troops, Boy Scout troops, and lately too a lot of the the churches: St. John’s in Hillsdale, and River Vale Community Church. It’s across all lines.”
He said organizers don’t censor content other than to say it’s got to be holiday related.
The main thing, Fitzsimmons said, is that it’s a grassroots event. “It wouldn’t happen without the Fire Department, the Police Department, the Department of Public Works, and the support of all the police departments in the area,” he said.
Security planning began in January or February. Parade planning in earnest started in October into November.
Inimitable elf
Longtime organizer Lee Tremble, of The Iron Horse restaurant and so much more in the borough, clarified of the lineup: “There can be only one Santa in the parade. You cannot put Santa in any other display because he is on the fire truck.”
Asked who Santa is this year, Tremble explained, “Santa is Santa.”
Tremble wanted this point made clear: “This is the Fire Department’s parade and we are gifting all the help to make it spectacular.”
He said, “This is awesome. This is the fruit of our labors 25–30 years ago, whenever we got it started, there were a couple of people that put the seed in.”
He said, “When I was young it was just the Fire Department and Santa on the hook and ladder, and everyone would come up to the park and sit on his knee and tell him what you wanted and get a candy cane.”
As time passed, he said, “A couple of folks in town decided they wanted to make it better: Elin Stolz, at Tyrell’s Florist, Timmy Hampton from Timmy’s service center, and myself. We made it a Home for the Holidays, maybe a band or two and a float or two and Elin was the driving force behind the whole thing, and then it got going.”
He said, “Then it switched directions and it was run by the Chamber of Commerce, and then the town tried to run it, and they didn’t really like doing it, and now it’s Mike Fitzsimmons, who really is the man. He is Santa’s helper when it comes to this.”
Tremble said, “He organizes it. [Borough Historian] Jim Gines goes down and, with Rusty Miller, gets everybody lined up and documents it. Go down to the Westwood Heritage Society and you’ll see pictures and pictures and pictures.”
Miller and volunteers from the high school get the marching bands and floats into position. At the sound of the fire whistle they stage the parade.
Both Tremble and Fitzsimmons recalled when the parade was held on a Friday, but commuter train traffic interfered. It was moved to Saturday to avoid rail activity, but there are trains on the weekends now too. They said NJTransit is aware of Home for the Holidays and works to accommodate it.
According to Fitzsimmons, in the late 1970s and early 1980s parts of the previous chamber had an idea for the stores to stay open and offer hospitality.
“Lee Tremble, Elin Stolz, Tim Hampton, Sid Finkelstein…they organized a lot of the stores staying open, and getting more people and more businesses getting involved in the parade,” he said.
He said when he got involved in 1999 Dot Dohrmann from the chamber proposed his Westwood Gallery had good acoustics and would be a great space for a string quartet for the night.
He’s also provided hot cider and cookies. “We start all of that as soon as the parade has gone past, having the open house,” he said.
Fitzsimmons said that chamber closed shortly after he opened, and it retooled in 2004.
Home for the Holidays briefly fell under the auspices of the Borough Council, notably of former Councilman Michael Pellegrino and his wife, Jennifer. When they stepped aside, Fitzsimmons took over.
He credited the Recreation Department for publicity and getting together the costumes and kids’ glow sticks. The chamber’s role came to working with sponsors, getting a DJ, and providing tables for hot chocolate.
“Now we’ve had another changeover in the chamber [leadership], and some of the merchants too. I think that for the most part it will kind of go back to those stores that will be open,” he said.
Team effort
Despite changes, traditions continue:
The Iron Horse has had a barbershop quartet performing for the past 20 years, starting at 6 or 6:30.
Tom Downs’s Shaw’s Books closed last year after 40 years on Westwood Avenue, so Caffe Anello reached out to Margie Downs to continue the annual reading of Chris Van Allsburg’s “The Polar Express.”
“The library does crafts and music and hot chocolate; there are performances in the bandstand. We take advantage of the DJ; Just Off Broadway and Ambition Dance Academy will perform in front of Oritani Bank as soon as they close down the streets,” Fitzsimmons said.
He added, “It’s like a mini Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, where they do their dance routines and then they go running off to get in line for the parade.”
‘The event of the year’
Outgoing Mayor John Birkner Jr. told Pascack Press last week that Home for the Holidays is “the event of the year, no question.”
He explained, “It exemplifies Westwood as a place that’s akin to Bedford Falls in ‘It’s a Wonderful Life.’ It really brings together the community—not just the Westwood community, but the Pascack Valley community.”
He added, “People come from all over the place. It’s a wonderful time of the year, it’s a joyous season, it’s everything that’s great about our town.”
Birkner said he cherishes “When I’m standing up on the bandstand with the governing body and we’re looking out over the crowd as the parade ends and as Santa comes up Westwood Avenue on the fire truck the crowd spills into the street and follows the procession.”
He added, “To see that mass group of people coming into Veterans Park for the tree lighting—that’s my favorite part.”
For more information, including where to buy commemorative ornaments, visit the Westwood Chamber of Commerce on Facebook.