Col. Falls' Night of Lights celebrates 25 years

Long before the First Best Place group formed to rejuvenate Columbia Falls, the Coming Alive in ’85 committee was on a similar mission.

Community boosters wanted a way to draw people into Columbia Falls to shop, so they organized the inaugural Night of Lights holiday parade held on a Tuesday night, Nov. 26, 1985.

“It was a very cold evening and only about five or six floats were in the parade,” Peggy Newman recalled about the first Night of Lights.

The Coming Alive group wasn’t deterred, though, and today the Night of Lights celebration offers the Flathead Valley one of the best parades of the year, plus a children’s holiday village, craft vendors and visits with Santa and Mrs. Claus. This year’s 25th-anniversary celebration is Friday.

“It was all started by a bunch of do-gooders,” said community booster Karl Skindingsrude, who was on the original Coming Alive in ’85 committee. “It’s just gotten bigger and better every year. It’s good old-fashioned family fun.”

Bill and Inga Meyer of West Glacier, who owned the Tick Tock Clock Shop on Nucleus Avenue in downtown Columbia Falls at the time, are credited with coming up with the Night of Lights concept. The second year the event was moved to Friday night and has remained a fixture ever since on the first Friday in December.

Skindingsrude still remembers what Steve Marquesen, owner of the Nite Owl and Back Room restaurants, told him in those early years.

“Our committee was meeting in the Back Room, and he said if you had gone out front to the coffee klatch and asked them [about a Christmas parade] you’d have never made it past the second cup of coffee,” he recalled. “But he said ‘you yahoos just did it.’”

Skindingsrude, who operates a sideline disc-jockey business called Special K Productions, has been announcing the parade and emceeing the event for many years.

“I’ll be there making noise again,” he said with a laugh. “It’s neat to see all the smiles and all the fun.”

Newman, also a longtime supporter of the event, remembers one particular Night of Lights parade 16 years ago when there was no snow, but a half-hour before parade time the sky opened up as if choreographed from above. Big fluffy snowflakes continued to fall through the evening, putting everyone in a festive mood.

Barb Penner, who along with Mary Hilton owned the Country Sampler in Columbia Falls in the mid-1980s, remembers their first float in the parade in 1986.

“The parades weren’t very long in those days,” she said. “They were cold, but fun. We still go down and watch the parade.”

Santa Claus visited with children at the now-defunct Park Mercantile during the first years. He later was staged at First Citizens Bank, and this year will be handling children’s wish lists at the First Citizens building that’s now called Discovery Square.

Fireworks were part of the early-day Night of Lights festivities. Pyrotechnic displays continued for five years but eventually became cost-prohibitive, Newman said.

Many of the original merchants who sponsored the first Night of Lights are only memories now — the Pines Cafe, Glad Rags, Double D Cafe, Hairport, Courtesy Motors, Coast to Coast and Montgomery Wards, to name a few.

The celebration has expanded through the years to include a festive children’s holiday village at Marantette Park and a live nativity scene staged near Smith’s grocery store by Our Redeemer Lutheran Church.

Craft vendors will be in three locations, including Discovery Square, the North Valley Hospital community room and Columbia Falls Senior Citizens Center, all on Nucleus Avenue.

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by e-mail at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com.