Skip to main content

Story: Parades and protest marches

Hay’s Christmas parade

Image
Hay’s Christmas parade

Santa parades were begun by department stores in the 1930s to launch the Christmas shopping season. They featured highly decorated and fanciful floats, often inspired by popular children’s stories and rhymes. This float, based on the nursery rhyme ‘The old woman who lived in a shoe’, was part of Hay’s Christmas parade in Christchurch in the mid-1970s.

Using this item

Christchurch City Libraries

Reference: CCL IMG ARCH812-06

This item has been provided for private study purposes (such as school projects, family and local history research) and any published reproduction (print or electronic) may infringe copyright law. It is the responsibility of the user of any material to obtain clearance from the copyright holder.

All images & media in this story

How to cite this page

Ben Schrader, Parades and protest marches – Royalty, sport, commerce, Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, https://teara.govt.nz/en/photograph/21094/hays-christmas-parade (accessed 4 June 2026).

Story by Ben Schrader, published 26 February 2010.