I was invited out to the We Love Langley Festival at Driediger Farms Market on the weekend. It was promoted as a Festival of Family, Food and Fun. The schedule for the day promised outdoor games with prizes, entertainment, poetry reading, a pie eating contest, scavenger hunt and vendors galore.
Surely I had accidentally picked up an old souvenir program from someone’s archives. I would have to take a look around and see if they could really pull this off. After all, there was no promise of video arcades, big screen entertainment, Wii Games or Xbox competitions.
I arrived on scene to find tents and tables set up across the field. The sign said it was a free event, no charge to get in, but if I wanted to donate to the Langley School District Foundation, there were places to do that. The smell of fresh baked bread was in the air and people were plopping ice cream on large slices of pie. Kids were sucking on Popsicles and there were crowds of people talking to vendors or heading out to the fields with pails and baskets to pick blueberries or strawberries.
In a shady spot, blankets were spread on the ground. Families gathered at picnic tables and enjoyed lunch or sampled berries they had just picked. There seemed to be a lot of smiling and laughing going on.
I was asked to be a finish line judge for the kids’ races. I waited to be given a page or two of rules but was surprised to learn that the premise was that the first kid to cross the finish line would be declared the winner and I would present them with a coupon to be redeemed on site.
The first race was a sack race. The kids were given a potato sack, told to put their feet in it and hop to the finish line. What? Would they do this physical activity? Would their parents not have to sign a release or a waiver in case one of contestants fell? Was I to give out only one coupon to the winner?
Surely I had entered some sort of time warp and had landed back in the 1950s. But the whistle blew and the kids hopped like crazy as parents and siblings cheered them on from the sidelines.
Then we moved on to the egg on the spoon race followed by a hula hoop competition. Even the youngest of children instinctively knew how to swivel their hips to get the hoop moving. Maybe they saw it on YouTube once or googled the instructions, but they were all very good.
The crowd cheered and no one was texting for a few brief moments on a beautiful summer afternoon. Oh, no doubt some sack race photos were zipped from cellphones to Facebook pages but all in all, the families were outside in the fresh air and the kids were having old time fun.
A lone violinist played some lively tunes and then we read the entries from the poetry contest while contestants signed up to devour a bumble berry pie in the pie eating competition. There was no end to the food on site, everything from pizza to pepperoni and, of course, the tinkle of the ice cream truck attracted a steady crowd on a hot day.
It’s amazing what can happen when you unplug your family for an afternoon. At least that’s what McGregor says.
