Velocity - comparing to today's date

Ugh. I know I've asked very similar things to this before, so I feel like I should know better....but I'm having trouble comparing a date to today's date. I've successfully done this in the past with two points in time, but not when one is today's date....and that's tripping me up. Here's what I have so far. $LTD.Expiry_Date__c is a date field that comes in from Salesforce like this: "2015-11-05".

##set time zone and locale settings for date conversions

#set( $TimeZone = $date.getTimeZone().getTimeZone('America/New York') )   
#set( $locale = $date.getLocale() ) 

##set a calendar object

#set( $calNow = $date.getCalendar() )
#set( $calConst = $field.in($calNow) )

#set ($validCredits = [])

#if( ! $LTD.Expiry_Date__c)
#set ($discard = $validCredits.add($LTD.Compass_ID__c))
#else

##set travel credit expiry date and convert it to a date, then a calendar so we can compare later

#set($TravelCreditExpiryDate = $LTD.Expiry_Date__c)
#set($TravelCreditExpiryDate = $convert.parseDate($TravelCreditExpiryDate,'yyyy-MM-dd',$locale,$TimeZone))
#set($TravelCreditExpiryDate= $date.toCalendar($TravelCreditExpiryDate))

##compare the expiry date of the travel credit to today's date.
##if expiry date is in the future, add to valid credits list.

#if ( $calNow.compareTo($TravelCreditExpiryDate) < 0)
#set ($discard = $validCredits.add($LTD.Compass_ID__c))
#end

#end

Here is the error I get:

Cannot get email content- <div>An error occurred when procesing the email Rendered_Email_Velocity_Error_Area_?! </div> <p>Invocation of method 'compareTo' in class java.util.GregorianCalendar threw exception java.lang.ClassCastException: java.lang.String cannot be cast to java.util.Calendar near</p> <div><pre >?</pre></div>

So either my travel credit isn't being formatted properly, or my current date $calNow isn't. I think the travel credit part is right since I've used that before. So I'm guessing it's today's date. But how can I fix this?

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance.