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VALLEY — Christian Service Center Director Cheryl Myers and her family are the grand marshals of this year’s Valleywide Christmas Parade, which will be taking place at 6 p.m. EST this Thursday.

Cheryl and husband Hermon Myers have been married for 52 years. They have three grown sons, James, Jeffery and Tony, and a daughter, Christy Eddy.

Since she has been the director of the Christian Service Center, Myers has seen the charitable organization grow from a small storage area to a large warehouse on Cusseta Road in
the Huguley community. The organization serves many local people in need and is espe-
cially helpful to them in the Thanksgiving and Christmas seasons.

“We started doing this our of our home in 1974,” Myers told The Valley Times-News. “We continued doing it in our home until 1990 and then we started doing it from several local churches and from the office of the East Liberty Baptist Association in LaFayette. We have been in our big building since 2008. In November, we served 160 families for Thanksgiving. We expect to have a similar number this month for Christmas.”

There’s still time to enter this year’s parade, which will start in Lanett on Thursday eve-
ning, December 8th. Entry forms are available at Valley Community Center and signing up
extends to 8:30 p.m. on Tuesday. Any street legal vehicle is eligible to be entered. There’s a $35 entry fee that drops to $30 with the donation of five cans of food. After the parade, the food will be divided equally between the Christian Service Center and the Interfaith Food Closet.

Just before the parade starts, the Valley-wide Parade Committee will select the first, second and third-place winning floats in the Community, Business and School divisions. Bands from Valley, LaFayette and Beulah High will be participating in the parade. It will be the final Christmas parade for the bands at Valley and LaFayette High. Next year, the returning band members will be in a very big consolidated school band. Local Christmas parades have been taking place for many years. Up until the early 1980s they were sponsored by the West Point Merchants Association and took place in downtown West Point. The holiday parade eventually expanded to take in all three local cities.

Lining up for this year’s parade will take place between the lower level of the Cherry Valley Shopping Center and Bluffton Funeral Services in Lanett. The parade will roll out on North 12th Street, turn left onto West 4th Avenue in front of the Corner Store in West Point and proceed three blocks north to the Point University campus, where the route turns right for one block to West 3rd Avenue, where it takes another right and continues through the heart of downtown West Point and recrosses the state line into Lanett on Highway 29.

The parade then continues over a long stretch of highway into Valley, where it will disband on the parking lot outside Walmart. Police departments in West Point, Lanett and Valley will be providing traffic control all along the route.