The St. Paul Heritage Festival was abuzz with the sights and sounds of the town’s cultural roots and makeup on Sept. 26 and 27. A substantial crowd filtered in to the curling rink, starting late Friday afternoon, growing with every hour.
Stands featuring food, crafts, and other cultural artifices covered one end of the curling rink, while the other half of the broad concrete floor was cleared to accommodate the evening’s performances.
I made my way there in the early evening to find the open room already well on its way to being packed, entering to the sounds of Dionnis and Bert Poulin’s duet guitar performance.
While the musicians played, other groups, dancers and performers were already gathered and ready to perform their arts to the audience. The acts ranged from ballet and karate katas, to piano renditions of Chopin and a solo dulcimer performance.
“It’s a great time, and it’s our first time here. It’s exciting to show off our work, giving quilts to our neighbours. It’s nice to get this kind of visibility today,” said Maggie Olson, a quilter with the Belles of Lac Bellevue.
Olson described the work of the Belles, draped on racks around their table at the back of the room, as “comfort quilts.” She explained they specifically crafted the complex and often time consuming projects for people in need, suffering from death, sickness, or other crises, as a way to show people there is someone thinking about them.
“We gave one to the officer who was hit in May in her car, during that shooting downtown. We give lots of them away.”
Many other crafts and history displays filled the rink. At one table, a woman carefully painted Pysanka Ukrainian Easter Eggs with an eye for detail, and a marked concentration that I couldn’t break with even the flash of my camera.
One table held a series of binders full of laminated, organized photographs, newspaper entries, and posters relating to the Stoney Lake Stampede over a series of decades.
“We’ve been collecting pictures, starting in ‘63. We’ve been saving our own, and getting pictures that other people contributed. We’ve collected over 52 years worth of original posters. We decided to put it all together,” said Steve Drobot, one of the participants in the project.
But of all the booths, the food stands were busiest. People flocked to the arrayed trays of everything from bratwurst to sushi, sampling a cultural smorgasbord that spanned the east and the west, and the new and old worlds.
Students with Portage College done up in full white chef garbs, moved to and fro, offering samples from plates full of samples of dishes they’d been working on as part of their education.
I peered around a wall of people’s backs and shoulders that ringed the Filipino food exhibit to see plenty of steaming hot dishes and tickets being exchanged. Ukrainian perogies and kubasa were featured on plenty of people’s sample plates as well.
One of the busiest and most fragrant food stands was one that featured Jamaican cuisine. As several people tended to and served out the heaping of spicy and fried Caribbean food, I managed to convince one of them, Nikki Wilson, to stop and talk in the middle of all the hustle and bustle.
“Jamaican food has a lot of spices and flavour to it. People all over have heard about our jerk chicken, and they all want to try it,” she said.
The large crowd at the tables attested to the popularity of the ethnic foods. Town of St. Paul FCSS director Linda Boone, who was also one of the organizers for the event, told me, “We’re just getting started, but I think we’re going to easily get at least 500 guests tonight.”
“There’s a nice variety of performances,” she noted, adding that this year’s event had some new entertainers, such as a regional group doing the blues. The event also expanded to include an art exhibit on Saturday.
“Every year, this is a growing, changing event,” said Boone.
