Kids pack Firemen’s Park for chilly, soggy egg hunt
This year’s Easter Egg Hunt at Firemen’s Park was nearly a wash out.
Thursday night, event chairman Dave Whitely of the Stamford Centre Volunteer Firemen’s Association (SCVFA) took a walk around the park and didn’t like what he saw. Two days of rain had left the grounds drenched, with puddles everywhere.
Hardly ideal for hundreds of kids scrambling for chocolate.
“It was questionable this morning whether we were going to run it,” he said Saturday, as the usual throng of kids and parents started filling the park. “Instead of doing it like the ‘hunt,’ where we throw them all out on the ground and the kids go crazy, we would have had several of our members sitting at picnic tables with boxes of eggs, handing them out.
“It’s not the same.”
Despite years when there was snow, this was the closest the hunt has come to being cancelled. But even with the chill and soggy conditions, it went ahead as planned with about 600 kids scouring the ground for their sugar rush.
The 22nd annual event gave away about 500 pounds of chocolate - between 35,000 to 40,000 individual eggs to kids aged 4 to 11. As always, they were divided into groups, making their mad dash every 20 minutes
from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.
It’s one of the biggest events of the year for the SCVFA, requiring about 40 volunteers.
In addition to the eggs there was bouncy castles, face painting and free Starbucks coffee.
The clean-up is surprisingly easy, says Whitely. The kids leave no egg behind.
“We never have to send anybody out to clean up the rest of it,” he says. “It’s amazing, really…there’s two boxes of eggs for every run, and it takes maybe two minutes and they’re gone.”
The hunt is also a showcase for the park, he adds.
“It gives people new to the community a chance to come out and see the park, see what’s here. That’s what it’s all about.”