Manistee's Sleighbell Parade, where a horse team pulls a 30-foot tree upright

The finale of the parade is a tree standing up. A team of Belgian draft horses drags a 30-foot Christmas tree down River Street, and then — with the crowd packed along the brick storefronts in the dark — the horses haul it upright and it becomes the town’s tree for the season. That single image is why people drive in from all over for Manistee’s Victorian Sleighbell Parade, held the first weekend of December as the centerpiece of Old Christmas Weekend.

The rules are what make it feel like time travel. Entries are asked to use sleighbells, live greenery, cloth ribbons, and fresh fruit — no plastic. Any music has to be period, performed live, with no recordings and no amplification. And the lighting has to read as candles, lanterns, and oil lamps; electric or battery lights aren’t allowed unless they were already wired onto an old buggy, wagon, or sleigh. So the parade comes down the street by firelight, with horse-drawn carriages, bagpipers, and turn-of-the-century characters, and a town of Victorian lumber-era buildings playing itself.

It fits Manistee unusually well, because the downtown isn’t a recreation — the brick blocks really do date to the 1880s and 1890s, when salt and pine money built the place. The weekend wraps the rest of the historic district in too: a Festival of Trees, “A Christmas Story” up the hill at the 1903 Ramsdell Theatre, and tours of an 1890s lumber-baron mansion.

Dress warm and get there early; the good spots along River Street fill up well before the horses come through, and once the electric streetlights feel out of place, you’ll know the parade is close.