Christmas can unlock memories moments that are locked away all year — until the holiday spirit hands us the key.

A couple of these special snowy December moments to be lifted gently from our box are the memories of Christmas parades and holiday shopping in downtown Butler.

The pre-mall holiday seasons on Main Street were a magical, small-town experience highlighted by a Christmas parade. The first march of music and floats in Butler was held in 1955, 10 years before the annual “Spirit of Christmas Parade” took its first steps in 1965. It began with the hope that after the last float had passed by, Christmas spirited-parade watchers would stay to rush up and down Main Street — and through the welcoming doors of our town’s festively decorated stores in search of holiday gifts.

It was a Hallmark movie come to life.

After being announced in the Butler Eagle the week before Thanksgiving 1955, the anticipation grew until the 9 a.m. start time Saturday, Dec. 3, finally arrived.

Thousands left their warm homes for Butler’s downtown to view Butler’s first-ever Christmas parade. The crowd of onlookers stood 10 deep between the street and the storefront display windows filled with enticing Christmas merchandise as three city police officers riding motorcycles and the Butler High School Marching Band led the parade.

Excited young children sat on their fathers’ shoulders for a better view of the milelong procession that stretched from Natili’s Restaurant and Lounge on the corner of Main and Wayne streets to the just announced site of the new Howard Johnson’s Restaurant on the corner of Main and East Fulton streets.

There were giant balloon floats to share the limelight with the green uniformed CD of A Drum and Bugle Corps marching in the shape of a religious cross, the Meridian Fife and Drum Corps and the white-coated Lyndora Drum and Bugle Corps. All three groups played Christmas melodies along the route to put spectators in the holiday spirit.

The parade was promised by its sponsor, the Businessmen’s Bureau of the Butler Chamber of Commerce, to be a truly special Christmas parade featuring 35 mammoth Jean Gros Giant Balloons.

Gros, a native of France who lived in Pittsburgh, had studied the large papier-mache pageantry of European mummer’s parades and the large helium balloons of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. For a fee the Frenchman provided “one of America's most unusual attractions,” his air-filled rubber fabric balloons.

His idea had proved successful, with cartoonish looking characters from the world of fantasy being seen by record crowds in the largest cities across America. They were of unlimited length, but no more than 15 feet in height to fit under the utility wires of America’s smaller towns. Jean Gros would make Santa’s workshop come to life in downtown Butler.

More than 150 Butler High School boys volunteered to dress as clowns to help roll the larger-than-life floats attached to wheeled metal sleds down the parade route. During the 30 minute procession, the crowd was delighted by an enormous Christmas tree balloon illuminated with 250 colored lights reflecting in the windows of Miller’s Shoes.

Next came an orange and blue pig’s pointy ears and pug nose barely clearing the utility lines. Less than a half-block away, a 20-foot-long green sea serpent slithered past the “Hub Men and Boy’s Clothing Store.”

The longest attraction was the 150-foot-long “Oomph Express Train” that was reminiscent of the Lionel sets for sale in Aland's Toy Store. The float was complete with an engine, tender, passenger and flat car. It was made and sewn by hand using 4,000 square feet of rubber fabric, 1,000 gallons of paint and required 10 men six months to design. Riding on the open flat car were four balloon musicians who appeared to be playing instruments to the prerecorded songs hidden inside the train’s engine.

Spectators that had grown tired of standing could wander in from the cold to warm themselves with a hot cup of coffee at G.C. Murphy’s lunch counter or satisfy their sweet tooth with the best chocolate in town at Cumming Candy Store.

Swiveling around on their stools in the Five and Dime or facing the street from one of Tom Cummings’ antique booths, they could view through the storefront windows the bigger than life inflated Tex the Cowboy, Sam the Snowman, Humpty Dumpty, Porky Pig, Felix the Cat, a 50-foot-long black and white dachshund or a very large, long-nosed Olive Oyl-looking character pressing the ivory colored painted rubber keys of an organ balloon, complete with 50 pipes bellowing out Christmas songs into the air.

But even Christmas shoppers looking for an inexpensive gift at Bill’s Bargain Barn, an quality necktie for “dear old dad” from McCarren’s or some perfume for Mom from Jaffe’s, would have emerged to enjoy the sight of the star of any December celebration, Santa Claus. This proved to be the grandest and most colorful of all the balloons as it sledded by the Jay Shop’s child-size mannequins. Dressed in Christmas sweaters and red dresses, their eyes appeared to grow as big as sugarplums as Santa went by.

The 110-foot-long parade float had arrived from the North Pole being pulled by air-filled replicas of Donner, Blitzen and the rest of the jolly old elf’s reindeer herd.

These visitors from the Arctic seemed to be dancing and prancing while pulling a live Santa Claus seated in a wooden sleigh. Kriss Kringle “Ho Ho Hoed” and smiled through his thick white beard at the children pushing forward through the crowd to wave to the red-suited man they counted as their beloved friend!

With Santa fading into the distance becoming a parade-ending memory, the sound of bells chimed from the traffic light posts ushering winter-coated shoppers across the snowy streets from store to store.

Mr. Claus, however, magically reappeared to welcome believers in the basement of Troutman’s Department Store while generous Yule-time shoppers dropped coins into the Salvation Army’s red kettle outside the front entrance. Parents pushed against the brass plate of the swinging doors of Aland’s Toyland carrying presents home to be hidden from peering eyes until Christmas morning.

Children gazed through the large display windows of Woolworth’s with frosted breath, trying to spy a live, small green turtle in the back of the store that might be left as a pet inside a penciled-holed box under their tree.

Boys and girls admired shiny, new bicycles in Montgomery Ward that, 16 years earlier, had given away for free the storybook written by Ward employee Robert May, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” Down the street a few blocks, the young and old stopped by W.T. Grant’s variety store to wish Carmichael the talking myna bird a “Merry Christmas!”

Finally, before heading home with arms filled with packages, families passing the beautiful Butler Theater on East Jefferson Street smelled the luring aroma from the “The Hot Dog Shop.” Sitting down at the restaurant’s half-circle, stooled counters, customers heard the yell from white uniformed waitresses calling “two hots, pickle also” to the cooks who quickly placed “dogs” inside soft, hot-steamed buns, smothering them with warm chili sauce.

Many years, or should I say decades, have passed since the sight and sounds of hundreds of snowflake-covered shoppers hurried in and out of dozens of unique Butler stores at Christmastime. The annual “Spirit of Christmas Parade” and a few newer stores still provide a glimpse of what once was, but nearly all of the beloved downtown stores of yesterday, except for Miller’s Shoes, the Penn Theater and Cummings’ Candy and Coffee Shop, are gone now.

The rest have faded away like the pine scent of a Christmas tree after New Year’s. That world now only exists in the distant memories of those who were fortunate to have grown up before malls and big-box stores convinced us their sterile world of sameness was better. The music and words by Victor Herbert and Glen MacDonough in the classic Christmas song “Toyland” perfectly express the essence of this lost time: “Toyland, Toyland, beautiful girl and boy land … once you cross its borders, you can never return again!”

Bill May of Butler is a historian, speaker and tour guide.