Arvada brings cultures together at Mcilvoy Park
Despite frisky weather, a large crowd visited the Arvada Winter Fest on Saturday afternoon to experience a new, culturally driven event.
The Arvada Festivals Commission designed the free, family event at Mcilvoy Park to be a place where people of different cultures and backgrounds could come together and share a small part of their cultural history.
“We are here to promote Peru,” Sandra Benavides Monteverde, administrative assistant at Consulate General of Peru in Denver said. “We always go to community festivals to give out cultural information and tourist attraction information.”
Monteverde’s booth was one among many distributing cultural information.
Arvada Sister Cities International for example, raffled baskets offering food from countries around the world. They also were handing out pamphlets and informing the crowd of their goals to encourage cultural awareness and foster continuing relationships between citizens of Arvada and their sister cities.
“It’s really amazing how so many people from different cultures come together as one,” said Lina Kornyushin of Arvada. “We live among each other but a lot of times we stick to our own, but this brings everyone together.”
Kornyushin and her sister Lily Krutikov — born in Russia but raised in Colorado — are both directors of the children’s church choir at the Ralston Hills Slavic Baptist Church in Arvada. They originally intended to have their youth choir sing at the Winter Fest, but cancelled the concert due to weather conditions.
“This is an amazing way to evangelize and meet the community,” Krutikov said. “You can see a big difference between people, different cultures, different styles. We love coming to these places.”
The Slavic Baptist Church was definitely the most popular stand of the day as they offered free food. They began by giving out grilled Shashlik (Russian chicken kebabs), then a rice dish, and later on, to help warm people up, a delicious Russian soup.
People line up to get their warm soup at the stand.
Kids seemed to enjoy the event more than anyone as they played multiple games inspired by countries around the world, made their own origami figures and collected passport stamps from different booths.