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Blossom Festival: Anatomy of a parade

Creston Valley Blossom Festival Parade emerges from past, celebrates the present moment, and wends its way into the future
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There is really nothing like parade, when you think about it, that so captures the spirit of a community, and all its bustle, enterprise, history and people. It’s more than just a metaphor, it is the community fitted into a space too small to contain it — it then bursts onto the streets in a river of joy and wends its way past the thousands of residents and visitors who line Canyon Street to cheer it along.

And there is nothing like the Creston Valley Blossom Festival’s parade, the oldest parade in southeast B.C.

Every Blossom Festival has its theme, but this year’s is especially significant — Celebrating Creston’s Centennial. Creston was incorporated May 14, 1924, which makes it a springtime town, very youthful and ever hopeful. A Taurus, too.

The whole Centennial celebration’s remarkable achievement was to meld this sense of history with the future. The Drone show, held earlier in the week as an advance event, Tuesday, May 14, as darkness fell, is an example of pointing the way to the future. Put on by the Town of Creston’s Centennial committee, the customized light and music playing out in the skies above the Community Complex was met with rave reviews, and, in this age of wildfire hazard, showed us what a future without fireworks could look like — fantastic!

As to the past, the opening ceremonies, held Friday at the KRSS Theatre, covered the past century in music, with Creston’s outstanding musicians and performers covering every decade.

And all over town and the surrounding region over the weekend, events and activities explored all aspects of the community life — the Yaqan Nukiy, the local small businesses that are unique to Creston, the bustling artisan scene.

But it’s the parade which combines the past, present and future. Service clubs, businesses, teams, institutions, people of all generations, music, art, agriculture, tourism, history — everything combined to make the parade a perfect encapsulation of Creston and the zeitgeist.

Since 1942, year by year, the Blossom Festival parade seems to flow out of the community’s past to celebrate the present moment, much like the season itself, the full height of Spring, which is Creston’s season.

The Blossom Festival parade is a parade without finish — if you were to follow it, you would find yourself 100 years in the future. See you there.

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Barry Coulter

About the Author: Barry Coulter

Barry Coulter had been Editor of the Cranbrook Townsman since 1998.
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