During the later years that Eaton's ran the parade, the bulk of the work associated with staging the event was carried out at their 24-acre Service Building near Weston, in the north end of Toronto.

Preparations got underway with preliminary meetings held at the Parade Workshop, only a few weeks after the running of the previous year’s parade. Initial sketches for the floats were drafted, reviewed and refined.

The Special Events Manager, along with the artists and the parade’s construction supervisor consulted with one another several times before the final sketches were adopted and scheduled for production.

The video clips to the right and below are excerpts from a film produced in 1960 called "How to Build a Santa Claus Parade." They illustrate the design and building of floats.

The floats were made of plywood, wallboard and papier mâché, shaped and mounted on a framework of metal, chickenwire and wood. Hundreds of gallons of paint and thousands of yards of coloured metallic paper were used in the process.

The construction crew worked almost entirely from the sketches without the aid of blueprints. Experience, imagination and a little ingenuity were sufficient to create and assemble the floats from start to finish.

The majority of the floats were completed in a few weeks, but the more elaborate ones took as long as two months.

The creators of the floats were allowed plenty of latitude in length but the maximum height was usually about 15’ owing to overhead wires along the route. The average length of a float was 40 ft.

How to build a Santa Claus parade, 1960
16mm motion picture film,
colour original reversal A&B rolls, silent
Reference Code: F 229-401-0-33
Archives of Ontario

How to build a Santa Claus parade, 1960
16mm motion picture film,
colour original reversal A&B rolls, silent
Reference Code: F 229-401-0-33
Archives of Ontario

Typical of what could be done by combining carpentry and mechanics is 'Jumbo' the giant-size mechanical elephant. The picture below shows Jumbo appearing to walk by himself with his head turning and trunk swinging from side to side. Made of wood, metal, wire and burlap the 13-foot high elephant was propelled by an automobile engine geared to a series of cogged wheels and chains built into its frame. There had been other 'Jumbos' but this one made it's debut in 1961 and was still going strong 17 years later in 1978 when this picture was taken.

Like the floats, costumes always played a large part in the parade and took months to design and fabricate. Similarly, the costumes were created from sketches. They were then cut to standard sizes and the wearers selected according to weight and measurement to fit the finished product.

The ideas usually came from nursery rhymes and illustrations in children’s story books. But the keynote in costuming was that each and every outfit must be bright and colourful, and pleasing in appearance to the tiniest tot watching the parade.

Wardrobe attendants took great care to preserve the costumes for future use and they were stored in air-controlled rooms between parades.

About half the marchers’ costumes, and all of the costumes worn by the youngsters on the floats, were new each year. Even those that had been used the year before were changed in appearance in some way. All costumes were made a little on the large side so that the marchers could wear warm clothes underneath.

Things didn't always go according to plan, however. During one of the parades in the 1940s, a female participant split a crucial seam in the back of her costume. Luckily, the parade was just passing a tailor shop where a fast repair job was completed, and she rejoined the parade in a matter of a few minutes with none of the spectators the wiser.