Mummers Parade

The Mummers Parade is held each New Year's Day in Philadelphia. It started in 1901, and is the longest-running continuous folk parade in the United States.

Local clubs, usually called "New Years Associations" or "New Years Brigades", compete in one of five categories: Comics, Wench Brigades, Fancies, String Bands, and Fancy Brigades. They prepare elaborate costumes, performance routines, and movable scenery, which take months to complete. This is done in clubhouses – many of which are on or near 2nd Street (called "Two Street" by some local residents) in the Pennsport neighborhood of the city's South Philadelphia section – which also serve as social gathering places for members.

Multiple Philadelphia television stations have aired the parade through its history; beginning in 2023, the latest of these is Wilmington, Delaware-licensed WDPN-TV, known as MeTV 2, which also provides live stream coverage through the website of its sister station WFMZ-TV in nearby Allentown, Pennsylvania. On at least several occasions, the parade has been nationally televised. In 1994 and again in 1995, it was televised by the Travel Channel. In 2009 and 2010, parts of the parade were televised nationally on WGN America and WGN-TV.

The parade traces back to mid-17th-century roots, blending elements from Swedish, Finnish, Irish, English, German, and other European heritages.

The parade is related to the Mummers Play tradition from Great Britain and Ireland. Revivals of this tradition are still celebrated annually in South Gloucestershire, England on Boxing Day along with other locations in England and in parts of Ireland on Saint Stephen's Day and also in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador around Christmas.

Swedes and Finns, early European colonists in the Philadelphia area, brought the custom of visiting neighbors on "Second Day Christmas" (December 26) with them to Tinicum. This was soon extended through New Year's Day with costumed celebrants loudly parading through the city. They appointed a "speech director", who performed a special dance with a traditional rhyme:

Here we stand before your door,
As we stood the year before;
Give us whiskey; give us gin,
Open the door and let us in.
Or give us something nice and hot
Like a steaming hot bowl of pepper pot!

The Mummers derive their name from the Mummers' plays performed in Philadelphia in the 18th century as part of a wide variety of working class street celebrations around Christmas. By the early 19th century, these coalesced with earlier Swedish customs, including the Christmas neighbor visits and shooting firearms on New Year's Day (although this was common in other countries as well) as well as the Pennsylvania German custom of "belsnickling," where adults in disguise questioned children about their behavior during the previous year.