Ashburton looks set to keep its Santa parade after all, with the mid-Canterbury town’s residents digging into their own pockets to rescue an event that appeared dead only 48 hours earlier.
The parade’s long-time organiser, Carol Johns, announced early this week that the December event could not go ahead. She had been unable to line up a major sponsor and had received only half the council grant she asked for, leaving too big a hole to cover the bill for closing the town’s main street. Within two days the decision had been reversed, not by a council rescue package but by ordinary people handing over cash.
“The parade will now go ahead. The support from the community has been out of this world,” Johns told RNZ. More than $3,500 was donated inside 24 hours, and new sponsors came forward, which was enough to restart planning for the parade on 5 December.
Johns has run the parade for more than a decade, and it has become a fixture of the Ashburton calendar, drawing families onto East Street to watch floats, marching groups and the man in the red suit himself. This year the numbers simply would not add up. The event usually relies on a major sponsor worth about $5,000, but with businesses feeling the squeeze of a tight economy, that money did not materialise.
The single biggest cost is not the floats or the lollies thrown to children along the route. It is the traffic management plan needed to shut the street safely, which runs to about $3,500. That is the sort of unglamorous expense that rarely makes the news but can quietly sink a volunteer-run event.
Johns had applied to the Ashburton District Council for $4,000 towards the parade but was granted $2,000. She made no secret of her frustration that the town’s signature Christmas event was left short. “I’m grateful they have done it previously, but I don’t think it’s too much to ask,” she said of the council’s support.
The council, for its part, said the shortfall was not a snub but a reflection of how much demand there was for a limited pot of money. Chief executive Hamish Riach said the community grants round had been heavily oversubscribed. “Eight applications were received, with total funding requests about $35,000, while the available funding pool was about $24,000,” he said. With requests running well ahead of the money available, some applicants were always going to be disappointed. “It is not uncommon for applicants to receive less than the amount requested,” Riach told 1News.
Riach was also clear that the council wants the parade to survive. “We’d like to see it continue, and we’re ready to discuss practical ways we can help,” he said, leaving the door open to a conversation about how the event is funded in future years.
Behind the immediate funding gap sits a longer running disagreement. The council treated the 2025 Christmas market, run alongside the parade, as a commercial event rather than a community one, and charged a $2,050 permit fee for it while waiving the fee for the parade itself. Johns has not paid that bill and faces debt collection over it. She rejects the idea that the market was a money-making venture, saying it exists to bring people into town at Christmas. “I consider it a community asset,” she said.
That distinction, between a commercial event and a community one, is the kind of line councils across the country are being asked to draw more often as budgets tighten and every grant is contested. For Ashburton residents, the argument over permit fees mattered far less than the prospect of losing a night out that generations of local children have grown up with.
The speed of the turnaround says something about how much the parade means in a town of around 20,000 people. Rather than wait to see whether the council would find more money, residents and businesses simply funded the gap themselves, and did it within a day. It is a pattern seen in plenty of smaller New Zealand centres, where a well-loved event teeters on the edge and the community closes ranks to keep it alive.
The parade is still five months away, and there is planning to be done before floats roll down East Street on 5 December. Organisers will also want to shore up the finances properly so the event is not living hand to mouth again next winter. The council has signalled it is willing to talk about a more durable arrangement, which could spare Johns and her volunteers the annual scramble for money.
For now, though, the immediate crisis has passed. A parade that looked finished on Monday was back on by Wednesday, paid for by the very people who line the street to watch it. Details of this year’s route and line-up will be confirmed closer to the date on the NBS Ashburton Santa Parade page.
Has your town ever rallied to save a local event that was about to fall over? Tell us about it in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job π
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