It is time, once again, to test the mettle of those petals.
The 136th Rose Parade is set to kick off at 8 a.m. PST on New Year’s Day and roll along 5.5 miles of Pasadena streets before an anticipated crowd of hundreds of thousands.
Celebrating this year’s parade theme of “Best Day Ever,” some 32 floats, 20 marching bands and 16 equestrian groups will traverse Colorado Boulevard, through the heart of Old Pasadena.
“The 2025 theme celebrates life’s best moments — those unexpected times that bring a smile, warm our hearts and fill us with joy…. Together, we celebrate where we’ve been and what we look forward to. It’s about family, friends, and community and what we have to celebrate — and to be thankful for,” Tournament of Roses President Ed Morales said in a statement.
This year’s parade grand marshal is Billie Jean King, the tennis icon and gender equality activist who won 20 Wimbledon titles, 39 Grand Slam titles, and drew an audience of 90 million people worldwide for the televised 1973 “Battle of the Sexes” match in which she beat onetime national tennis champion Bobby Riggs.
When she was announced as the parade’s grand marshal in October, King, a Long Beach native, said it “is like a dream come true.”
“As a child, the annual Tournament of Roses Parade was a big deal in our home,” said King, 81. “We used to talk about it all year long. … We looked forward to it every single year.”
The Rose Parade started in 1890 as a promotional event by the Valley Hunt Club, a social organization, to show off Pasadena’s famously mild winter weather.
“In New York, people are buried in snow. Here, our flowers are blooming and our oranges are about to bear. Let’s hold a festival to tell the world about our paradise,” Charles F. Holder, one of the parade’s originators, said at one of the club’s meetings as the parade was being planned for the first time, according to the Tournament of Roses.
The earliest “floats” were horse-drawn carriages adorned with flowers.
Today’s massive, motorized floats, which take months to build, must be entirely covered by natural materials such as flower petals, bark, beans, corn husks, seeds and leaves. They travel an average of 2.5 mph, according to the Tournament of Roses.
As for the weather forecast in Pasadena on this New Year’s Day?
“All in all, it should be a pretty perfect day,” said Mike Wofford, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Oxnard.
People camping along Colorado Boulevard should prepare for temperatures to dip into the low- to mid-40s overnight before warming to the mid- to high-50s during the parade, Wofford said.
The 2021 Rose Parade was canceled for the first time since World War II because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
It returned to a smaller crowd in 2022, but attendance has been growing in the years since.
Candy Carlson, a spokeswoman for the Tournament of Roses, said in a statement to The Times that about 750,000 people lined the route in 2024, compared with about 700,000 in 2022, indicating a “strong return” to pre-pandemic crowd sizes.
“The consistent growth in attendance underscores the Rose Parade’s enduring appeal and the joy it brings to our community and visitors from around the world,” she said. “We’re confident this year’s parade will continue to draw a vibrant and engaged audience.”
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