The City of Gainesville is kicking off the holiday season with its annual Jingle Mingle celebration Saturday on the downtown historic square.
Main Street Manager Nicole Parham told AccessWDUN the event will begin at 4 p.m. with a variety of family-friendly activities to look forward to.
“We’ll have open houses of some of the businesses in the historic district, we’ll have live music carriage rides, we'll have a kiddie train,” Parham said. “And of course, Santa is going to come on the Gainesville fire truck.”
Additionally, Jingle Mingle will feature a meet and greet with the Coca–Cola polar bear and a s’mores station.
This year’s musical lineup will include performances by Balthazar Gradin, Young Singers of Northeast Georgia and Elevate Performing Arts from 4 to 6 p.m.
As always, the event will include traditions such as the Lighting of the Chicken at 7 p.m. and photos with Santa from 5 to 8 p.m. However, Parham highlighted this year’s celebration will include a twist to encourage the public to shop locally.
During the event, Jingle Mingle participants will be able to stop by the Main Street booth to choose a wishlist item off the Adopt-a-Shop tree.
“That is our Shop Small on Small Business Saturday campaign, where we're encouraging our community to pick out their favorite downtown business and go big for them over the holiday season,” Parham explained.”There's basically a little card, like you'd see on an Angel Tree, but it has six things for you to do for that one business. And if you complete those six things, you can put your card into a little box, there's six participating businesses that will have those boxes around, drop that off, and then on Small Business Saturday, we'll have a prize drawing.”
Road closures on Main Street will begin at 1 p.m. For a layout of the event and other details, click here.
