Everybody loves a parade. Except, that is, when thousands of the expected audience don't show up. Despite perfect weather, an enthusiastic crowd, a great display of both historic and state-of-the-art fire trucks, and more marching bands than you'll see in a lifetime of parades, the grumbling and disappointment started even before the last tuba crossed the finish line. All around the village and town, people seem to be reeling over the vastly over-estimated number of attendees the convention and its Saturday parade brought to our streets.

This week, residents and merchants are saying they were told of numbers ranging from 15,000, to 25,000, all the way up to 30,000 expected spectators. If you ask those same people how many people actually came to watch the parade, they'll tell you similarly varied numbers: 3,000, 2,000, 1,000 people came to Ellenville to watch the parade, they say. Official estimates from the event's organizers place the estimate at around 8,000 (which may or may not include the parade marchers themselves), somewhere in the middle of what people expected and what they perceived.

So what gives?

We humans have a tendency to exaggerate when we predict. Our predictions, it would seem, often conform not necessarily to reality per se, but more in line with what we want. Case in point: no one seems to know where these astronomical predictions of spectators came from. The Ellenville Journal certainly played a part in the situation, reporting numbers we were told by government officials and the police department, but where did their numbers come from? Convention organizer Chris Depew blames people leaning too heavily on numbers culled from previous HVVFA conventions in Lake George, already a hot-spot for hustle and bustle that would easily have numbers like that on weekends even without a parade.

This is all innocent enough, until, that is, the unrealistic hopes become very real expectations of government officials and local merchants. When organizations and businesses gear up for a crowd that never comes, money is lost, efforts are wasted, and fingers start pointing. But worst of all, what was a good and worthwhile event gets tarnished with everyone's disappointment.

And why did our post-parade estimates get so much lower than those of the organizers'? Well, once we saw that our five-figure predictions didn't pan out, disappointment set in. Our estimates became a lot lower than what was maybe there, almost echoing our disappointment.

Here are the facts: the parade was great. It brought fun and color to our streets, and brought the community out to say 'hello' and welcome firefighters to our area, while showing them gratitude for their hard work.

Was it everything we hoped it'd be? No…but not because it wasn't a success. Instead, our predictions were so out of whack that we couldn't help but be disappointed. Everyone is so convinced that Ellenville and Wawarsing are in need of a savior, that we're making ourselves blind to the great community and events we've got going on right now.

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