No Abbeville Christmas Stroll this year

This year hasn’t presented many easy decisions.
While it wasn’t an easy one, Abbeville Mayor Mark Piazza said the decision to cancel the 2020 Abbeville Christmas Stroll was the right decision. The event would have taken place this Thursday.
“It was a difficult decision to make,” Piazza said. “We feel like the businesses, especially at this time, need all the exposure that they can get. That was the whole point in starting the stroll years ago.
“The origin of the stroll was to bring business to downtown Abbeville.”
After Gov. John Bel Edwards announced on Nov. 24 that Louisiana would be moving back into Phase 2 restrictions, Piazza said bringing people en masse to downtown would be too much. Piazza pointed out that Phase 2 does limit numbers for outside events to 150 people.
“When the governor moved back into Phase 2,” Piazza said, “restricting crowds, even for an outside event, it really forced us to make that decision.”
After some uncertainty regarding the decision to hold it at all, city officials had initially announced in early November that this year’s Stroll would take place. That was prior to the surge in COVID-19 cases that prompted Edwards to re-implement Phase 2 restrictions. Piazza said the goal to have it was to help those businesses, again, the mission of the event.
“We wanted to try,” Piazza said, “this year of all years.”
In the end, Piazza said the city didn’t want to put pressure on the businesses that would be open and would have to monitor capacity and masks, with people coming in and out.
“We already had a couple of the 10 businesses taking part share some concerns,” Piazza said. “When it came down to it, it was the right decision to cancel.”