By Kevin Haas
Rock River Current
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ROCKFORD — Inside the downtown Stroll on State workshop is a large photo of an infant gazing at an ornament on the city’s official Christmas tree with a sense of wonder and awe.
That photo, according to Kristen Paul, wasn’t just a piece of decoration. It was an inspiration.
“Whenever it is insanely crazy and we’re like, ‘what are we doing, we’re losing our minds,’ we look at that photo and we remember the why,” said Paul, the Rockford Area Convention & Visitors Bureau’s director of destination development. “We remember that we’re here because we’re making memories for families that maybe otherwise wouldn’t have them. …
“This picture for us was just the epitome of that.”
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The photo was captured in 2013 at the first Stroll on State, a massive daylong event that serves as the city’s start to the holiday season. It had been enlarged and placed inside the workshop for years, but the staff never knew the identity of the child. This year, they found out, and Stroll staff got the chance to meet the now 9-year-old boy that had served as an inspiration for so long.
The boy is Hayden Conklin, and the picture was just a quick cell phone snap taken by his mother, Lauren. The family had turned the photo into an ornament of its own, but it wasn’t until a couple weeks ago that they learned about the importance it had for the Stroll team.
On Oct. 14, Stroll on State posted the photo on its Facebook page asking for help finding the child. It only took a couple of days. A friend forwarded that post to Lauren and her husband, Scott, and on Wednesday the family united with the Stroll on State team to take part in the official announcement of this year’s event. This year’s 10th annual Stroll takes place from 2 p.m. to 9 p.m. on Nov. 26 in downtown.
“We were shocked, but in a great way, to find out that Hayden has somehow become the face of Stroll on State with all his childhood wonder in that picture,” Lauren Conklin said. “For us it’s really special, but we had no idea other people felt the same way.”
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The family said Stroll has been a big part of their holiday season. That weekend is typically when they decorate their house, set up their tree and then head downtown for the Stroll.
“It puts us in the spirit of giving and Christmas, and really the magic in the air,” Scott Conklin said. “To think that Hayden was a catalyst for all that was incredibly heartwarming.”
Paul handed Hayden a gift filled with Rockford-themed merchandise Wednesday to thank him.
“We wanted to say thank you for being our inspiration,” Paul said. “You may not have known it, but you are a Rockford ambassador, so we figured we better set you up with some Rockford swag.”
The family of five, which includes 6-year-old Asher who was also at Wednesday’s event, said they will celebrate Stroll again this year. Their 15-year-old son, Milo Bloomingdale, was in school and not at the event. Now that Asher and Hayden are older, all five can run the Dasher Dash holiday-themed race for the first time together.
“We love what’s going on downtown,” Lauren said. “We love this sort of revival, and we love events like this that we can invite people, that we can show off our city, that we can introduce our boys to that we can show them what it really means to be a true Rockfordian.”
This article is by Kevin Haas. Email him at khaas@rockrivercurrent.com or follow him on Twitter at @KevinMHaas or Instagram @thekevinhaas.