Autumn Night at Pioneers’ Museum celebrates the beauty of fall
IMPERIAL – The combination of fall season, Halloween, and Dia de los Muertos was the perfect mix for the Imperial Valley community to celebrate “Autumn Night at the Museum” here at the Pioneers’ Museum on Friday, October 13.
The event was held to where visitors gathered to celebrate the nuances of fall but also bring visibility to the museum.
“All these things have in common is the fact that they’re autumn celebrations and we want to bring attention to them,” Pioneers’ Museum Director Caitlin Chávez said. “We want to inform people while having fun and engaging in other activities and let them know a little bit more about the holidays.”
As the first time Pioneers’ Museum has held an event like the Autumn Night event – which brought out 500 people in attendance from across the Imperial Valley and as far as as Los Angeles – to celebrate the change of season and its subsequent holidays together.
“We wanted to invite the public for free educational fun and also kind of reflect on the fall season and what the fall season might mean to different people in our community,” Chávez said.
“We just wanted to show people the importance of history and the museum in the Valley, and that it also shows all the cultures and diversity that lives in our community,” Kerstie Payne, planning committee participant, said.
Vendors were selling and patrons enjoyed the fresh apple cider, delicious kettle corn, elotes and baked goods. Also on display were the fun of Halloween inspired arts and crafts as well as the experience of having face painted as “La Calavera” tradition.
A little petting zoo station was also available at the event which included pygmy goats, a donkey and some smaller animals from Imperial Valley local 4-H groups and ranch friends.
The “Catrin y Catrina” and the Build-a-Scarecrow contests were also part of the atmosphere of the event. Halloween-inspired arts and crafts and a scavenger hunt to learn more about autumn celebrations in Imperial Valley were adding to the fun of the harvest season celebration event.
An “ofrenda” exhibition (an Dia de los Muertos-themed altar in honor of departed loved ones) was displayed at the event. Robert “Bob” Diaz, also part of the planning committee, was in charge of the booth, where he placed many informational posters to identify different elements and what they meant in regard to the ofrenda itself, teaching people about the cultural Dia de Los Muertos celebrations amid Mexico and other parts of Latin America.
The ofrenda display will be at Pioneers’ Museum until noon on Wednesday, November 1.
“It gave me the opportunity to use a sample of my family,” Diaz said. “I built the “Ofrenda” to honor my ancestors and in particular my mother and father, so if you were to look at it, you would see the elements that made sense to my ofrenda and relevant to my family.”
Fun was the main theme of the event, after fall season and holidays. Children were participating in rucksack races as parents and family members enjoyed classic rock tunes and taking photos at a photo booth.
“I saw plenty of kids that had lots of their that had their faces painted and they were just so beaming with pride because they got to pick how their face was painted,” Diaz said.
The event was made for everyone who wanted to have a great time in the community at the same time as learning something new about the museum or fall season holidays, the museum director said.
“Every time we do something at the museum we want it to be fun,” Chávez said. “We want it to be also educational, that you walk away and you learn something new about local history.”
“(Because) people that normally wouldn’t just go to a Halloween event because (of) whatever their beliefs (are), there was fallout effect or if you wanted to learn something more cultural,” Payne said, “like Dia de Los Muertos, which means a lot to the residents of the Imperial Valley. You could come see that (here).”
The Autumn Night at the Museum was just one of the many events Pioneers’ Museum wants to bring to the community by promoting education, but also hosting an event for locals to just have a good time.
“We don’t have lots of opportunities in the Valley to have such a wonderful display of antiquities in the in the museum,” Diaz said, “so instead, what we wanted to do was to have allow the kids to have fun and to be able to tour the museum for all the amazing artifacts from our past.”