'Snow' falling on city's downtown holiday display
By Karen Blakeman
Advertiser Staff Writer
The song was sung, the light switches flipped and the crowd turned from the mayor's Christmas tree at Honolulu Hale to watch the Electric Light Parade make its way down King Street.
Eugene Tanner • The Honolulu Advertiser
Honolulu City Lights blazed for the 17th year. More than 15,000 people jammed the official start of the holiday season: Christmas Hawaiian style. To show solidarity after the Sept. 11 attacks, the city added a lighted flag near the tree, and a patriotic bent.
The 17th annual Honolulu City Lights celebration last night drew more than 15,000 people.
The parade moved toward Punchbowl, and a cloud of white flakes, thin at first then growing thicker, floated in from the opposite direction. A muttered confusion moved through the crowd on the corner.
Was it pollen? Ash?
"I thought they were bugs," admitted 5-year-old Ethan Hill, who grabbed happily at the white stuff from the shoulders of his father, Charles.
A Hawaiian Electric Co. electric car, followed by go carts, passed silently. The Castle High School band, wearing reindeer antlers, played a medley of Christmas songs. The Meadow Gold cow waved.
"It's snow," said Freda Apolonie, her tone betraying just a little friendly impatience with those in the crowd not quick enough to make the connection. "Snow, Hawaiian style."
The parade continued — fire trucks and city pickup trucks wrapped in colored lights, the chief and officers from the DARE unit waving shaka signs from police vehicles. And the little white flakes floating past the street lights and palm trees, ejected from some unseen snow machine, began to look a little like the real thing.
"Snow?" said Sandra Langley. "We've just moved to Hawai'i from Colorado, and it's snowing on us?"
Jim Howard stretched tall to see the next entry in the parade — a garbage truck draped in red, white and blue.
It was Christmas season, 2001. The lights were on in Honolulu.
