Festival of Lights 2018

[sabotabby]

As you may know, the Kensington Market Festival of Lights is my absolute favourite event in Toronto. It's a solstice parade of giant puppets, activists, musicians, and weirdos that culminates in a giant burning in the park. Defiantly grassroots, anticapitalist, and anticolonialist, it is a light in the darkness—literal and metaphorical—and a wild, utopian vision of what the city could be if we allowed it.

Below the cut is my annual attempt to capture what the parade is like. One of these days I'll bring my actual grownup camera, but it's always too crowded for a short person like me to get good shots anyway.

Happy solstice, everyone.





















You can't see what was truly hilarious here, which was that as we were passing by, one of my friends noted that there was only one Doug Ford piñata, and it would be destroyed in seconds. Then the people running it handed the contestant a pool noodle, which is an apt metaphor for the resistance to the Tory regime.

Comments

[fidget]

Canada is magical. Thank you for giving me a peek into this wondrous land of maple.

[sabotabby]

Toronto expends a lot of effort suppressing its magic (though not to the degree that Ottawa does—why on earth did I set an urban fantasy there?). But occasionally it peeks through.

[fidget]

I am going to tell you a true story:

The only time I've ever left the country was to go to Niagara Falls when I was 7 or 8 for a long weekend. Before that, I knew next to nothing about Canada. On that trip, I learned that Ottawa was the capital, and for whatever reason, my fevered little child-brain came up with that it had been built by beavers. Like, the city stood atop a beaver dam, and the capital building looked like our capital building, except that it was made out of twigs. I have no idea why that popped into my head, and even though I knew it wasn't true, I've carried that mental image around for years.

So, Ottawa is probably at least a little magic.

[sabotabby]

That would easily be a billion times more awesome than it actually is.