Skip to main content

Heritage Park Nerdgasm ie. Yiddish, Famous 5, and fresh baked cookies...oh my!

I was pretty excited last Fall when I was entering Heritage Park to enjoy their Harvest Sale and noticed that they were building a new exhibit, "The Famous 5 Interpretive Centre"! I love Canadian History and and am especially interested in the role women have played in shaping it (something sadly lacking in the education system). I'm lucky to have friends who also find this kind of thing interesting. So, this week Michelle, Danaya, and I went on an afternoon adventure to the past! After a Yiddish lesson at the Montefiore Institute, shopping along the Main Street, an outdoor performance, and fresh baked cookies, we made our way to the 4pm tour at the Famous 5 Centre. The house is a duplicated (though somewhat modified) version of the house Nellie McClung lived in while in Calgary. The house itself was nice but nothing special. What did shine was the passionate and well-educated tour guide. It was a pleasure listening to him tell the story of Nellie McClung and her fight with the other 4 Alberta women to have women seen as persons according to the Canadian Constitution! A fight that took them all the way to England! A fight that was considerably harder than it should have been (I think the British were a little embarrassed that Canadians had to be told by them that the British North American Act assumed women to be persons). It took the work and support of many men and women to bring about the necessary changes to start Canada on a path to becoming egalitarian. These ladies (the famous 5 and my strong and smart friends in the pictures below) make me proud to be Canadian!

Comments

  1. If there was a like button I would definitely be pressing it right now!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mmm Cupcakes!

 So I went over to the Harris household for what Laura and I have dubbed a cupcake date! For those of you who don't know who Laura is, she is Jonathon's little sister (refer to the story about Jonathon if you're not sure who Jonathon is). The cupcakes were so fun to make and turned out pretty good! Ever since Jonathon passed away about a year ago his family has kind of adopted me as the closest they'll ever have to a daughter in law. None of us know of course whether things would have worked out between Jonathon and me, but regardless of this fact and their acknowledgement of it, they have welcomed me as one of their own. It makes me happy that I made Jonathon happy for the short time he was in my life. I find myself connecting with his family on so many levels and feeling so at home with them. I have mixed feeling about all of this, but I think Jonathon would be happy that I met his family and continue to spend time with them. I hope I can be something of a comfort ...

You can dance if you want to

So I have a not-very-secret pleasure that I indulge in on occasion. I love to dance. I often dance around my apartment in the evening or on the weekend as I'm getting dressed (thank goodness I live alone or I might scare someone). My sister also likes to dance and so if my dancing becomes a social activity instead of an alone-in-my-apartment activity it would be because of her. I'm grateful for this because, though I love to dance, I find myself somewhat at odds with the dance scene in Calgary. Sure I like the idea of going Salsa dancing with friends or going to a club for a drink and some dancing, but the reality is very different. What the dance scene in Calgary really turns out to be is a meat market (singles scene). My Mom once asked me why I don't dance wth guys at clubs when I told her about us girls wearing each others wedding rings to try to avoid being hit on. I told her that if a gentleman asked me to dance and knew how to dance I would love that, but wha...

Redemption

I spent some of this weekend thinking about the word redemption and what it means. Not necessarily the religious context of it, but the taking a wrong and making it right idea. I think this stuck with me because I watched a few movies over the weekend in which the themes were about making things right and using your pain to help others. Like everyone I have had some painful things happen to me and have struggled with the anger and despair that often accompanies being hurt. In the book The Shack the author calls his main character's pain (due to the murder of his youngest daughter) "the Great Sadness." This makes sense to me because some of the bad things that can happen in life seem so consuming that they haunt you no matter how hard you try to ignore them. I am often reminded of this fact when something new in my life causes me pain (a conflict. a death, etc). All of a sudden the floodgate of old pain re-opens and I find myself back at the beginning of my pain...