Mark this summer as a summer of celebrations with a difference. Not only are we enjoying a greener outdoors and a more promising crop outlook in much of the Prairies, but Alberta and Saskatchewan are also marking 100 years of province-hood. So there is much to celebrate.
Centennial celebrations, ranging from a royal visit to community events to special family holidays, are taking place throughout Saskatchewan and Alberta. The energy, enthusiasm and imagination that citizens and communities are pouring into the centennial celebrations are astonishing. This is especially true for many smaller communities where celebrating the centennial seems to have taken on special significance.
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These celebrations are not just significant for those who live in the communities but are also drawing thousands of participants who moved elsewhere back into their home communities.
Homecoming reunions of families, graduating classes, sports teams and other community groups are drawing people together to celebrate their pasts, recollect shared memories and renew acquaintances. Reunions celebrate the value of personal relationships and the significance of our interconnectedness.
Another highlight of the centennial celebrations in many rural communities is the parade. Parades are a unique and revealing form of entertainment.
The array of entries can include antique vehicles, floats, machinery, horse-drawn conveyances, bicycles, motorized wheelchairs and pretty much anything capable of achieving forward motion. It is this potential for variety that provokes anticipation and makes parades so entertaining.
There are lots of possibilities for surprises and the hilarity is never limited only to the clowns.
Parades, like religious or academic processions, are public rituals that describe or express something significant about our shared lives. Parades are festive and entertaining, but they are also serious in that they capture and reveal something about our history, our times and our communities.
The fine restorations of farm machinery, old vehicles, historical relics and replicas express a public honouring of our own old things. It illustrates our recognition of the importance of our past.
The sheer variety of the items in a community parade is also revealing. Unlike trade shows, parades display the role of local businesses in the context of the many other organizations that function in the community.
The local garage float is preceded by the Lions Club float, followed by an antique car, a senior’s music float, the grocery store float, the volunteer fire department truck, and others. Parades show the diversity in our communities and knit it together in a relatively orderly line (barring unruly horses, recalcitrant engines or disorderly drivers).
Parades are a key part of community celebrations this centennial year because they open a public space to display the current vitality of our community, to honour our past and to poke fun at ourselves. Parades express movement, energy and festivity. They are a ritualized honouring of our way of being, our past and our future.
So wave and smile, and join the parade into the next 100 years in our prairie communities.
