Mobile Holiday Cheer: Second Annual Meyerland Golf Cart Parade

More than a dozen golf carts – many decked out in lights and tinsel and playing Christmas tunes – tooled around Meyerland Sunday night to the delight of neighbors gathered in the street for the second annual Holiday Golf Cart Parade.

The brainchild of Melissa Bayne, the parade kicked off last year after a group of Meyerland residents who all own golf carts talked about forming a caravan one night to drive around the neighborhood and look at holiday lights. The idea evolved. 

“It turned into, let’s be the lights,” says Bayne, “let people watch us.”

So neighbors set out to decorate the golf carts that, over the years, had quietly accumulated in the neighborhood. No one’s quite sure which neighbor was the first to buy a golf cart to keep at home, but it’s a trend that’s taken off. Bayne got hers as a Christmas gift from her husband, John, two years ago. She uses it to take her son, Cooper, 12, and daughter Jenna, 10, to Kolter, and, in pre-pandemic times she dropped her kids off at neighbors’ houses for playdates.

The Welch family – Nick, Connor, Corinne, Morgan and Kristin, holding the parade’s youngest participant, Rhys – pose with their reindeer cart. 

“There were one or two carts, and then people heard about them, and they got one, and word kept spreading,” she say. “They’ve kind of exploded over the last couple years.”

Last year, the parade featured four golf carts decorated for Christmas and four for Chanukah. This year, there were sixteen. Bayne and her family decorated theirs with lights, garland, a Bluetooth speaker blasting Christmas music and duct tape to hold it all together. Another family decorated their cart with silver and blue lights and added a menorah on top. Yet another topped their cart with reindeer ears. 

“So many people came outside,” Bayne says. “A few of our fans last year became participants this year.”

Erin Koren and her son, Beckham, 6, daughter Charlotte, 4, and husband, Nick, decorated their cart with white and rainbow lights and donned Santa hats along the route. “Neighbors lined the streets and cheered, and several neighbors handed out treats for the kids in the parade. It was so magical,” Koren says.

The Korens bought their golf cart almost three years ago after moving to Meyerland. “We saw a few cruising around and we wanted to be a part of the fun,” says Koren, who, before COVID-19, would drive to neighbors’ houses for get-togethers. Now, during the pandemic, the cart has provided hours of safe, outdoor fun driving around.

Charlotte Koren, 4, and her neighbor, Eli Hadad, 5, ride in the Korens' golf cart.

Once, early on in her days of golf cart ownership, Koren’s cart stopped in the middle of an intersection. One of her kids accidentally kicked the cart out of gear, but Koren thought it had broken down. That’s when she met John Bayne. He was out walking the family’s dogs and used his newfound golf cart expertise to help her on her way.

“There’s a strong sense of community I would attribute to getting through floods together,” says Koren. “Meyerland is hands-down the friendliest, best neighborhood I’ve lived in. The parade is a fun, new tradition that I hope lives on for years and years.”

Melissa Bayne hopes to grow the holiday parade more next year, perhaps by adding prizes for the best decorated carts. But for now, she’s relishing in the fun she helped to create in what’s been a challenging 2020 and a very different holiday season.

“This time last year, we had no idea what a socially distanced event was,” Bayne says. “But with the golf carts this year, it ended up being just a perfect event for quarantine.”