{"id":380,"date":"2010-12-31T23:41:43","date_gmt":"2011-01-01T04:41:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ucog.org\/blog\/?p=380"},"modified":"2010-12-31T23:41:43","modified_gmt":"2011-01-01T04:41:43","slug":"mobiles-moonpie-midnight-drop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ucog.org\/blog\/index.php\/2010\/12\/31\/mobiles-moonpie-midnight-drop\/","title":{"rendered":"Mobile&#8217;s midnight Moonpie drop"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Thousands crowd New York&#8217;s Times Square to see the old year out and the new year in &ndash; according to man&#8217;s annual calendar. Mobile, Alabama competes with New York with its New Year&#8217;s moonpie drop!<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>This year was the third year in a row that Mobile has had its &quot;moonpie drop&quot; at midnight on December 31st. Moonpies are calorie laden marschmallow creme pies popular during the Mardi Gras parades here. <img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" border=\"0\" style=\"padding-left:12px;padding-top:10px;float:right\" src=\"https:\/\/www.ucog.org\/BILDER\/2010-12-31.jpg\" title=\"moon pie drop\" alt=\"moon pie drop\" height=\"275\" width=\"275\" \/> Fred Richardson is the Mobile city councilman who created &quot;MoonPie Over Mobile&quot; to usher in the new year. At the stroke of midnight, a giant electronic MoonPie was dropped from the 34-story RSA BankTrust Building, Mobile&#8217;s tallest building. The year prior to the first moonpie drop, 500 people were in Mobile&#8217;s downtown area to usher in the new year. When the first moonpie drop took place 3 years ago, a crowd estimated at 25,000 showed up, and this year it was 40,000 despite a tornado watch and rainy weather. Within a minute of the moonpie completing its descent to mark the start of the new year, a state-of-the-art laser show blasted off, along with four synchronized fireworks displays. People who came early were also treated to a Mardi Gras parade. The Mardi Gras season traditionally ends on &quot;Fat Tuesday&quot; and was first celebrated in the USA right here in Mobile in 1703. I missed all the fun, though &ndash; I was home asleep!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Thousands crowd New York&#8217;s Times Square to see the old year out and the new year in &ndash; according to man&#8217;s annual calendar. Mobile, Alabama competes with New York with its New Year&#8217;s moonpie drop!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-380","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-back-in-the-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ucog.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/380","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ucog.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ucog.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ucog.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ucog.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=380"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ucog.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/380\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ucog.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ucog.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ucog.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}