Mary Evans, chair of the Magical Night Committee, doesn’t know who first uttered the phrase drive-through Magical Night. It could have been Mount Vernon Parks & Recreation director Matt Siders or Tim Kelley, who created the animenagierie that grace uptown businesses.
All recognized that the idea — once it was uttered — was the perfect fit for how to make an event people were going to remember during the COVID-19 impacted year.
Magical Night is being recognized by the Mount Vernon-Lisbon Community Development Group as the event of the year.
Evans and her committee of 10 other volunteers began plans of how they would adapt some of the events that were central to Magical Night into something that families could experience from the safety and comfort of their vehicles.
The committee knew they could expect to be able to get roughly 250 cars through Magical Night in the 2 ½-hour time frame.
“I remember I was up at Cornell College that evening on the west end of Magical Night, helping to direct traffic in the roundabout,” Evans said. “Mount Vernon-Lisbon police chief Doug Shannon came over the radio to let us know we had vehicles backed up to Business 30 by 6 p.m. that evening, and we’d exceeded our goals of 250 vehicles in attendance.”
Evans said some of the key things she noted from the event – 450 vehicles traveling in bumper to bumper traffic for the night, and not a single accident occurring.
She appreciated how people adapted each portion of Magical Nights key activities – cookie decorations at First Street Community Center, the letters to Santa at the bank, the dancers at Palisades Café, the live nativity show at Memorial Park done by Saint Paul Lutheran Church and decorations of businesses in uptown, the luminarias from First Street Community Center to Cornell College that lit the drive – and found ways for those items to be experienced or seen via the comfort of one’s own vehicle.
Volunteers also acted out tableaux vivants, or scenes from the movie The Grinch Who Stole Christmas.
One of the biggest concerns for the committee was the chance people would get out of their vehicles at different stations, slowing the number of vehicles that were able to witness the drive-through Magical Night.
That didn’t happen, as Mount Vernon-Lisbon Community Development Group director Joe Jennison noted. The only people outside their vehicles that evening were members of the committee organizing the event through uptown Mount Vernon.
“It’s always something you’re appreciative of when you win any award,” Evans said. “The committee earned this award through the incredible amount of work that went into making this into a drive-through event the community could experience and enjoy.”