"Bright Lights, Big City" Christmas 4-H Float Ideas?

Ronda

November 14, 20080 found this helpful

The theme is actually :
BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CHRISTMAS!!
Again...any ideas will be greatly appreciated.

1) They do have battery powered Christmas lights you could drape around the rider on the horse, kind of draping near where the edges of a horse blanket would come to.

2) Since this parade is probably not at night, the light wouldn't show much, so what you may want to do is make a red horse blanket and edge it in white fluffy stuff (like Santa's coat) and also do the same with leg warmers and if you are able to, affix Santa hats on the ponies' heads--perhaps large enough to have ear holes?

3) If all of that would be too much, you could just have large wreaths around the ponies' chest/neck with a big red bow at the bottom and larger than life--about 5x3 in size plastic old fashioned Christmas light bulbs on the wreaths.

4) What would be cute is a Christmas tree on the float with the miniature horse on top as the topper but with angel wings (kind of like a pegasus) and a halo--perhaps out of paper mache or actually even better would be dipping cheese cloth in glue and putting it onto a form of the horse (that you'd be able to remove once it dried) and then stuffing the form with white Christmas lights so it'd glow. There are also horse lights you can buy to decorate the tree, maybe with a little tinsel and some red bows-but again, this may not show up too much in the daytime.

5) Lastly, you could have Santa driving a sleigh on the flatbed trailer and the sled be full of giant old fashioned looking plastic light bulbs--possibly rigged to glow if it'll be worth it and the sled be led, not by deer, but by miniature horses.
You must let us know what you finally do! Good luck!

Thanks so much for all the good suggestions so far. The parade is actually at night therefore the lights will show up so well. I think we are going to do a clear polish on the horses hooves & sprinkle green or red glitter on them. I really do like the angel wings ideal on Rocky (OUR MINI HORSE) but not sure how we will do the float.

We have 2 people starting out carrying the banner then 2 riding horses carrying the 4-H flag & the American flag. We've got quite a few more on horses following up behind the float, they will be wearing red or green sweatshirts with white turtlenecks underneath. We'll have the bells also intertwined in their manes and tails or around their feet...lol, just unsure of the float.

Frank Boyer

November 29, 20080 found this helpful

Ronda, I'm sure cost is a factor but, LED lights and lots of them. They do not pull a lot of current and you can use an inverter or a "jump start kit" (the little power stations with a jump starter,air compressor and 110v power outlet) along with a good sized car/truck battery to power them. We did a CandyLand Christmas" last year with over 3,000 lights on a 5x10 float, worked great. Our 4-H atv club took first place. We did the actuall Candyland board game, but listed our sponsors and locall businesses as the features of the board game.