JUNE 20 UPDATE: A break for fun

Tonight was the first night of Frederick's first annual Finn Fest, so all work (on the housebuilding and otherwise) stopped this evening for a bit of fun in the park.

A local group called Frederick Forward, with funding from a grant program called Horizons, has been doing a good amount of community development planning, and one of the things they came up with was an annual festival that honors Frederick's Finnish heritage. I've been involved in the planning to some extent, basically because I am on the marketing committee for Frederick Forward and had agreed to make posters and press releases for the event, but also because I was one of the only people who knew anything about Finnish culture at the one planning meeting that I attended.

In any case, tonight was the first night of the three-day event, so I was eager to see how it had come together. On the agenda was a picnic in the park, a Teener baseball doubleheader, duck races, a movie, fireworks, and a juhannuskokko, or midsummer bonfire on the Maple River. (The bonfire was my suggestion at that meeting in May -- no one else knew that it was a Finnish midsummer tradition.)

Things got off to a slow start, as not many people were there at 6 when the picnic started, and there seemed to be a lot of time between when the food was served and when the action of the evening started at 9 (unless you'd gone over to watch the baseball game).

But in the end, that was OK, too. The park was full of families with their children by 7:30 or 8, and if it didn't seem that very many out-of-towners had shown up, enough Frederick families were there to make the park seem lively. I saw a lot of moms and dads playing with their kids, and kids playing outside with each other, which was nice.

Sofia was pretty good on her first try on the rings.


But then she rediscovered her love of swinging, and it was hard to get her off of it to do anything else.

I was also pleasantly surprised to find out that the logo that I had designed for the posters and press releases had also been used on a T-shirt! You could purchase one for $10. You can see the main logo here, on the schedule of events. Mom also bought a T-shirt:

The tagline reads, "Celebrate midsummer in a little Finnish town on the prairie!"

The kokko, or bonfire, was really well constructed, in my opinion -- on a floating raft tied to the shore on both sides. We did wonder, however, how they planned to light it. When Dale Groop, a neighbor who had built the raft and stacked the firewood, told us what they were planning, I thought he was kidding:

But they really did have flaming arrows aimed at the raft from shore. That's Mark Sumption of Frederick shooting the arrows.

Unfortunately, it proved much trickier than it looked. If he shot too hard, the flame went out before it hit the target. If he shot too weakly, the arrow landed in the water. He also had to be careful not to pull back the arrow too far, and bring the flame too close to the bow, which he did not want to light on fire.

In the end, none of the five arrows he shot lit the fire. Though people had a lot of fun watching him try, I have to say.

So the Frederick folks went to plan B: They untied the raft from the far side of the lake, tied a fishing line to the end of that rope (it wasn't long enough to reach the near shore otherwise) and pulled it in to light it. Then they gave it push from this shore and reeled it in from the other shore to get it back into the center of the river.

I have to say, the crowd seemed quite impressed with the final result.


Especially when the river stilled, and the fire looked like it was burning down into the water as well as up into the sky.

There's more to come, tomorrow and Sunday. Though I think it will be hard to lure Dave away from the housebuilding for much of the weekend -- I'm pretty sure he'll think the weather is going to be far too nice for him not to be working. But Sofia and I will go see some of the events, I think. I'll try to get some photos of the wife-carrying contest.