While Martintown may have taken this year’s prize for stratospherically over-the-top Halloween decorations (if you drove the back way to Cornwall last week, you know what I mean), here on earth, Dunvegan’s Spooktacular Scavenger Hunt was also a great success. In fact, the idea proved so popular, that every time slot was booked within days and, unfortunately, people had to be turned away. “We could have done it two times over given the amount of interest,” Jennifer Black, curator of the Glengarry Pioneer Museum, told me. “We’ve rarely had that many ‘shares’ and ‘likes’ for anything… I think it the event was a perfect partnership.” All in all, 19 families with a total of 44 children went on a hunt for hidden words. On this quest, the participants had to brave a ghostly graveyard… a creepy spider lair covered in cobwebs… a witch’s kitchen… a monster’s den… and a dragon’s hoard. And, along the way, hidden ghosts and witches leapt out from the background and startled the groups. To win a bag of candy, the hunters had to find all the hidden words and then head over to the pumpkin-decorated pavilion where volunteers Louise Quenneville and Mona and Jerome André were exchanging goodie bags for completed sentences.
The event — a partnership between the Dunvegan Recreation Association and the Glengarry Pioneer Museum — was a truly collaborative effort with everyone on the DRA committee contributing time and ideas. Mona André coordinated the community candy drive and, with the help of her grandson Connor Joly and neighbours Asher and Abby Neely, the assembly of hand-decorated loot bags. The day before All Hallow’s Eve, Mike and Anne Bertrand, Kim Raymond and Jennifer Black supervised the installation of five spooky vignettes. Volunteers Braeden Hay, Bridan Russet, siblings Rowan and Lindsay McPherson and their cousin Jack Suter not only set things up on Friday, they also put away all the props on Sunday afternoon.
On the day of the scavenger hunt, volunteers Kim Raymond along with siblings Dell and Jess Boyce-Gagnon and Cheyenne and Nick Weidmar staffed the five stations and did their best to scare the kids out of their skins. It should also be noted that the pumpkins featured in the pavilion were grown and donated by Heather Raymond, and carved by members of the Raymond household. DRA event coordinator Anne Forrester-Bertrand emailed to say, “Feedback from parents was very good. Saturday afternoon provided a perfect opportunity for kids to get out and do something fun and parade around in their costumes. A fun time was had by all.”
As for our neighbour to the south, I can’t wait to see what they have in store for Christmas. I’m imagining a radiant-heated outdoor nativity scene complete with palm trees, sand, frankincense and myrrh imported from the Middle East, and live actors in the lead roles.
Imbalance of trade
The week before last, a little parcel I was expecting landed in our mailbox. It only measured about 4” x 3” by .75” thick and weighed in at no more than an ounce or two. It was from a small company in Matane, Quebec and contained the makings for a gallon of “instant barn board” solution. I’d built a new door for our old garage and wanted the spruce planks to blend in with their weathered surroundings. The cost to ship this parcel from the Gaspé Peninsula to Dunvegan, a distance of just under 750 kilometers, was $10.
What caught my attention was that a similarly sized package arrived around the same time all the way from China addressed to my son. When I enquired why it came here (a surprise for his partner), I also asked about the cost of sending a parcel halfway around the world. It turns out that Chinese marketers, and their customers in the US and Canada, are taking advantage of a sweet Universal Postal Union agreement that slashes postal rates on small packages for senders in developing countries. The idea is to stimulate international commerce and postal exchange from these regions. As the parcel addressed to my son demonstrated, the cost of shipping small packages internationally from developing countries is far less than comparable ones shipped domestically.
Now, I’m all for helping the underdog. But, China? Seriously? Believe it or not, the Universal Postal Union has classified this Asian powerhouse as a “Group III” underdeveloped nation, in the same silo as Cuba, Lithuania and Saint Lucia. I don’t know how the UPU arrived at this classification. But, in my books, a country with the second largest economy in the entire world, a full-time standing army of over 2.5 million soldiers and advanced plans for a manned moon mission is not a “developing” nation. When it comes to direct mail sales to Canada, they should be paying full freight, just like the company in Matane had to do.
In case you’re wondering, the Instant Barn Board concoction worked like a darn. In a little over a week, the fresh-milled boards have started to take on a dark grey patina of aged wood. Maybe not exactly “instant,” but who’s quibbling.
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