Old Town Orcutt

Important Information about the

2024 PARADE

Old Town Orcutt Christmas Parade  

December 14, 2024, 12 pm Weather Permitting

The Old Town Orcutt Christmas Parade has been a holiday favorite since 1961.  Started by the volunteer fire department, the parade remains a small town afternoon event.  A small group of volunteers form the Orcutt Community parade organize the parade. The Orcutt Lions Club also help with the planning and organization. They are joined by many more community members on parade day.  You'll see kids, dogs, floats, animals, cars, bands and our special guest Santa.  Join us on the second Saturday of December at high noon as we celebrate Christmas the Old Town Orcutt way.

Christmas Parade

From The Board of Orcutt Community Foundation

 After taking over the traditional Orcutt Christmas parade in approximately 2006, the Orcutt Community Foundation(OCF) and Orcutt Lions Club Members are feeling the growing pains of our parades continued success. Our group has worked tirelessly making this parade better and better each year, and we succeeded! However, unfortunately, not without growing problems.

We have proudly grown from just a few hundred spectators to over 5000 people in 2023. Our little parade has outgrown our ability to control traffic and the resulting impatient tempers. Big community events seem to always draw a few knuckle heads who spoil a good thing for the entire community.  Our traffic volunteers have been verbally abused. Barricades are ignored and driven around creating dangers for not only parade volunteers, participants, but spectators as well. There was even an attempt to run over a volunteer last year. You may think it can’t be that bad! It is and the last 5 years have progressively gotten worse.

With the safety of our participants, volunteers, and attendees at risk, our committee is facing a very difficult decision. The OCF board members’ decision was that if we could not hold the parade safely, we would stop the parade completely. 

We appreciate the few county deputy sheriffs, and California Hi-Way Patrol officers who volunteered their help for us over the years. With their support, we were able to cover the rest of the traffic control with volunteers. That traffic control plan is no longer a viable option. We needed 20 - 30 uniformed officers and patrol cars to take over traffic control completely. Our parade does not have the budget to pay for that. We reached out to our community officials with our concerns.

4th district supervisor Bob Nelson asked us to please keep the parade going. We explained our situation to supervisor Nelson. Our OCF board met a few times brain storming. We came up with a plan that should work.

  • Reduce the number of parade entries

  • Create a new shorter parade route. Santa Barbara County Traffic Engineers laid out a new route to ease traffic problems, engineers and law enforcement officers and county officials are happy with these new safety changes

  • Large groups will be required to bus in their participants in instead of having everyone come in separate vehicles

  • Uniformed officers will be in charge of traffic control


 Supervisor Nelson agreed to supply us with the uniformed county deputy Sheriff officers, and a few patrol cars. Hopefully, we will have a better, and more importantly a safe parade this year. Many thanks to Santa Barbara County supervisor Nelson, traffic engineers, road dept, and Sheriff dept.  

We will be posting more updates about the parade in the next few days.


Parade is funded with community donations, and small fundraisers, Stay Safe, enjoy our Christmas parade celebrating its 62-year tradition We Thank our community for your all of your support.


Orcutt Community Foundation Board Members.