As for the Astroturf playing surface, blue tarpaulins and hot-air heaters kept it clear and dry prior to kickoff. However, winds of up to 15 miles an hour forecast for Monday posed a potential threat to the city's annual New Year's Day Mummer's Parade, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The parade features marchers in elaborate and expensive costumes that could be blown by wind gusts. The Mummers Parade is folk art, a flamboyant celebration of the new year that is uniquely Philadelphian. Comic clubs feature clowns, wenches and other characters who satirize contemporary life.
Fancy brigades strut in precision.
The string bands don elaborate costumes and play toe-tapping tunes on banjo, saxophone and glockenspiel. The parade is a melding of European traditions. As early as the 1620s, immigrants from Sweden celebrated the new year by visiting friends, shooting guns and banging pots and pans to ward off evil spirits. Germans, Italians and Irish added their own traditions. The storm unexpectedly spared Washington before slamming Philadelphia, New York and New Jersey in its northward path.