LARGO \u2014 Against a backdrop of downtown transformation, the city\u2019s Old Fashioned Christmas Parade served as a festive throwback Dec. 20, as crowds lined the blocks-long loop off of West Bay Drive on an idyllic Saturday afternoon.<\/p>\n
While the district between Clearwater-Largo Road and Missouri Avenue experiences immense growth, anchored by the Horizon West Bay project featuring the new Largo City Hall opening this spring, the more than 20-year-old parade continues attracting people of all ages.<\/p>\n
Before leading a procession featuring a record number of entrants, including a handful of Grinches, several dogs and a gaggle of Jeeps, Mayor Woody Brown conducted a pre-parade pep talk that included some solid advice for throwing candy and beads into the crowd.<\/p>\n
\u201cAim for the ground, not the face,\u201d Brown told the group, advice that seemed obvious participants witnessed bite-sized candies and strings of bedazzled beads striking heads and noses.<\/p>\n
So, parade-goers, remember the mayor\u2019s words of wisdom next year: keep those throws low.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"LARGO \u2014 Against a backdrop of downtown transformation, the city\u2019s Old Fashioned Christmas Parade served as a festive…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":94973,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[32794,1186,4085,50644,596,202,204,203,199,201,200],"class_list":["post-94972","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-st-petersburg","tag-christmas-parade","tag-holidays","tag-largo","tag-largo-city-hall","tag-pinellas-county","tag-st-pete","tag-st-pete-headlines","tag-st-pete-news","tag-st-petersburg","tag-st-petersburg-headlines","tag-st-petersburg-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94972","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94972"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94972\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/94973"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94972"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94972"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94972"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}