By Adam Prudhomme
Staff Reporter
Culture and the harvest season will be celebrated in Greater Napanee this weekend as the annual Scarecrow Festival and Culture Days are combined once again for a full slate of activity.
The Scarecrow Festival will take place on Saturday and celebrates everything associated with the autumn season.
“The great slide is going to be a great super course this year, a 66-foot long super course,” said Kathy Medd, manager of the Napanee Business Improvement Area. “We’ve got pumpkin carving with Diane Irwin, we’ve got face painters, we have a balloon artist. Those activities have a small fee attached to them so people will buy tickets and those funds just cover the cost of bringing in these activities.”
In keeping with the rural theme, a life-sized interactive display known as Maple The Milking Cow will be on site. Though not a real bovine, the display allows children to simulate how to milk a cow. A diary farming expert will also be on hand to answer all questions about the diary industry as well.
Maple may not be real but there will still be plenty of animals downtown as the Lennox and Addington 4-H club will have a petting zoo and even demonstrate how they prepare a live cow for a judging competition.
“We’ve got great entertainment with a youth focus,” said Medd. “We’ve got Solomon Woodland, Shylah Hart and Ava Nicholls.”
There will be plenty for the youth to do at the festival as well as Lennox and Addington Resources for Children will be on hand with children’s activities and games. A pair of fairies are also scheduled to be downtown for photos. The festival runs from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.
Saturday will also mark the final Hometown Market of the season. To celebrate, the vendors will be getting together to host a corn roast while the 4-H club will host a fundraising barbecue. A horse drawn wagon will also be running between the Market Square and the Lennox and Addington County Museum and Archives, which will be hosting an antiques identification and dating clinic, running from 10 a.m. to 3:45 p.m. as part of Culture Days.
That’s one of several Culture Days events that will be held throughout town Friday through Sunday. It’s part of a province wide initiative. A full list of local events can be found by visiting www.CultureDays.ca and searching Napanee.
As part of Culture Days celebration, the Greater Napanee Arts Association is calling on residents to make their mark as part of a patriotic ‘pallet’able’ art design. The pallet’able art project calls on local artists to decorate a wooden pallet, with several already spread out through town.
“Most of the pallets are by one artist,” explains GNAAA vice-chair Tim Nimigan. “We’re looking to have 150 hands, red and white hands, placed on the pallet on both sides. After its finished we may take some artistic license in terms of pulling it all together. That pallet will become part of the collection we’ve started and placed somewhere appropriate.”
The pallet will be set up on the corner of John and Dundas Street, where people can dip their hands in the Canadian themed paint and stamp their hand on the pallet.
This will mark the second year the Scarecrow Festival has been combined with Culture Days and is a collaborative effort between the Napanee BIA, GNAAA and the Town of Greater Napanee and is made possible by dozens of volunteers.