With an uncomfortable Thanksgiving thankfully, now out of the way, the big Xmas shopping season is officially underway. Around here, it’s begun for the last seven or eight years with the Bon Marche Holiday Parade.

It’s a modest parade in comparison to its nationally televised big brothers (such as the one mounted in NYC by the Bon’s sister chain Macy’s). It runs for less than an hour and a half. Its floats and balloons are much closer to human scale. There are fewer celebrity guests, none of whom stop to lip-sync a song for the cameras.

But the Bon parade effectively accomplishes its job–to get a couple thousand or more folks downtown for the opening of the stores on Friday morning.

This year’s parade ended with a massive downpour of paper and foil confetti squares on Fourth Avenue in front of the Bon. Kids and adults alike reveled in the faux snow. But only for 20 minutes or so. In order to quickly reopen the parade-route streets to auto traffic, crews were set to immediately sweep up the confetti, a task they accomplished right on cue.

But by the time the confetti was all gone, so were most of the paradegoers. Whether due to the recession, post-9/11 jitters, or whatever, the stores on Day One of Xmas Shopping weren’t much busier than they’d been the previous Friday.

The downtown retail bosses planned for this situation by staging a second big event later that day, the lighting of the Bon’s exterior “star” lights and of Westlake Center’s big tree live on the 5 p.m. local newscasts. The regular downtown Christmas Carousel is back up, and the stores downtown and elsewhere are planning other crowd-drawing gimmickry over the next four weeks.

Hey, we could all use the free entertainment. Especially those among us who can’t afford all those fancy trinkets and baubles this year.