Carnival time......

Yesterday was the first day of the Canmore Winter Carnival. We're in for a couple of weeks worth of cool wintery events including kid and mutt races, log sawing, ice carving, snow sculpting, curling on the pond, I even heard some whisper of maple syrup snow taffy making which sounds like an event I absolutely must attend! 

Well it all kicked off yesterday with the lantern parade. Poor Neil missed out as he was working but the kids and I headed into town to check it out. Now I'm going to apologize for my photos, it was quite a task to get pictures and keep track of my kiddies in the bustling crowd not to mention eat the free pizza, cookies and drink the free hot chocolate. I could hardly say no could I?

 The event kicked off in the civic centre plaza, thats the civic centre in the photo up top. It's quite a lovely building right in the centre of town. Once again there were fire pits dotted about here and there, such a lovely touch for this sort of event, although it was actually a warm evening and I even survived the whole thing without wearing mitts! The crowd were all very jolly and the array of colourful knitted hats was enough to make anyone smile! 

As the crowd started to gather, a really cool drum group started to play. They had a didgeridoo  and a guy shouting and chanting and encouraging the crowd to join in. Then a lady came out dressed in hot pants and a skimpy top and just as I was beginning to wonder what would happen next she set fire to her hula hoop and started to do this amazing firey hula dance to the sound of the drums and chanting. It was quite dramatic and very carnivalesque that's for sure!

The lanterns were lovely. There were big ones and small ones, some were on gnarly old sticks and some were on old ski poles. I saw a beautiful deer head lantern but sadly didn't manage to get pic (must've had my hands full of free nosh). My favourite was this huge totem lantern....

When everyone was suitabley riled up we set off on our parade. Following the lead of one of the volunteers we headed off on a half hour loop around Canmore. First we headed up towards the pond where we stopped just in time to see some big fireworks blast off. We were pretty close to them and Seb was totally mind blown! He loved it!

There must have been a couple of hundred people in the parade and most of them had some sort of lantern. We were led around our loop by the marching band from Banff high school. It seemed to be mostly big drums and made the whole thing very atmospheric and enlivening. Seb and Bel were bopping away for most of the walk :) My favorite part was walking the trail through the trees along the creek. It was so cool to be walking only by the light of our lanterns with the stars twinkling through the tree tops above. We looped through town and eventually arrived back at the civic centre for a bit more fire hula and drumming.

We finished up the evening by snaffling our free cookies by the fire pit before heading home thoroughly satisfied by our evening of community togetherness and carnival fun.