Celebrate with snow man at New York New Year’s Eve
Weather to co-operate as calendar flips over
The snowman is on stand-by for tonight's New Year's Eve celebration in downtown Kelowna.
Although the city got 14 cm of snow on Saturday, much of it had melted by Sunday afternoon.
So the organizers of the Valley First New York New Year's Eve have again put out a call to Redline Bobcat Services to bring in some truckloads of the white stuff.
“Our snow guy is on stand-by,” Festivals Kelowna executive director Renata Mills said with a laugh on Sunday.
“He’s kindly agreed to scour the hills for us to find some nice, clean, fresh snow for the kids to play in,” Mills said.
About 6,500 people are once again expected to gather in Stuart Park and Kelowna Community Theatre for an outdoor-indoor, family-friendly free way to ring in the New Year.
The temperature should be a couple degrees below zero when the event begins at 6 p.m., dropping to -5 C by its end at 9 p.m.
“One thing I think will be different this year, because it's going to be relatively mild, is that people will come down early and stay for the whole event, right up to 9 o’clock,” Mills said.
“When it’s been much colder, people have had to be sort of strategic, deciding when to show up and how long to stay,” she said.
Events and activities include live musical performances by the Hillside Outlaws, Kenny (Blues Boss) Wayne and Sherman Doucette. There's also kids games, cartoons in the community theatre, air hockey, face painting, bouncy castles, food trucks and free hot chocolate.
“Midnight” is marked at 9 p.m. with a seven minute fireworks display.
“The nice thing … is that it gives people two ways to celebrate the New Year,” Mills said. “They can come down to Stuart Park with the munchkins and the grandparents, head home after 9, and go out again later if they want.”
New York New Year's Eve has become a fixture on the Festivals Kelowna calendar of events, and Mills doesn't foresee that changing anytime soon.
“We do talk about ways to freshen it up all the time,” she said. “If we ever saw attendance starting to drop off, or had trouble lining up sponsors, we might rethink it, but we still have lots of support and the feedback we get from people is incredible.”