We first entered the Saanich Fair as a distraction. In 2001, my mother, Janet Wilson, was suffering continual pain from rheumatoid arthritis.

I couldn’t make her feel physically better but thought that entering her knitting in the Saanich Fair might help take her mind off her discomfort.

It was a family joke that sparks flew off my mother’s knitting needles as she turned out sweater after sweater for her g r a n d c h i l d r e n . Mum wasn’t too keen on my idea, saying that far better knitters would be submitting their work. But she went along, probably thinking this was something that she could do for me.


Gloria Dol does some final cleanup in the poultry area at the Saanich Fair Tuesday. The fair runs from Sept. 4 to Sept. 6 at the Saanich Fairgrounds at 1528 Stelly’s Cross Rd. Darren Stone/Times Colonist

We made it a family event. Mum’s knitting and a child’s smocked dress were entered in seven categories. I dusted off an old electric toy oven my mother’s parents gave her when she was a child and we put that and other items in the Looking Back in Time historical section.

My daughter, then a preschooler, entered her arts and crafts in the junior section. I made a family (and newsroom) favourite: gingerbread cookies, using Mum’s recipe taken from an issue of the Times or the Colonist about 40 years earlier. The small browned clipping is still filed in our family recipe collection.

I also submitted other baking entries, not expecting to win anything.

When I took out the entries, a volunteer carefully went through the box of Mum’s sweaters, a couple still slightly damp from my hand-washing the previous evening, making sure that each was entered in the correct category. Who knew there are so many different types of knitting? It’s like another language: There’s the carried-yarn technique, fancy stitching, the bobbin technique, intarsia, and more.



The volunteer particularly admired a blue sweater with a button on its pocket, knitted for my daughter. Mum had made several tiny, knitted stuffed toys and attached them to the button with braided wool. The toys could ride in the pocket without fear of losing them.

The day of the fair was sunny and hot. The first place we went was the Needle Arts and Needlecrafts room in the Agricultural Hall. Mum was delighted to find several ribbons on a number of her entries.

She was especially thrilled to see that little blue sweater with the toys, with a second-place ribbon pinned on it, displayed high on a wall. Our camera flashed.

We headed to the Household Arts section. A blue ribbon adorned my gingerbread cookies. Mum was so pleased that I’d won. I also took home two third-place ribbons, one for oatmeal cookies and another for matrimonial date squares. More pictures.

Then it was over to the Looking Back in Time building where Mum took first prize in the toy category. Out came the camera again.

In the Junior section, my daughter won two third-place ribbons, one for a big yellow rabbit mask and another for her caterpillar made from a recycled cardboard egg carton. You guessed it — more photos.

The four of us, my mother, me, my daughter and her father, were extra silly this day, even posing in those wooden cut-outs with holes for faces. Mum delighted in following her granddaughter through livestock displays to peer at pigs, cattle and chickens. A couple of times, Mum was overcome by pain and had to rest, but she stayed at the fair for a few hours.

Not only did she have a wonderful time that day but it gave her, and all of us, happy memories to talk about in the coming year.

In 2002, we were back at the fair. Mum again came home with ribbons, taking first place in adult plain sweater for her knitting. She also won second prize in the Looking Back in Time clothing category for a knock-your-eyes-out rhinestone-decorated slinky black dress she had bought for a date with my father many years earlier.

My daughter won a second-place ribbon for a fridge magnet and a third place for a mask.
Using one of Mum’s recipes, I made matrimonial date bars again. What a surprise to see a first-place rosette on them for best in show.

In the baking category, my gingerbread cookies came in second this time. Mum and I huddled, scrutinizing the winning plate. “They are bigger than yours,” she said and added I could put in more molasses next time.

Although our family does not live on the Peninsula, we feel as though we are part of the fair community whenever we enter. I’ll always be grateful to the volunteers for helping bring happiness to my mother.

Mum died last year and I wasn’t going to enter the fair. Then I remembered standing with her at the gingerbread cookies and the fun we had at the fair and sent in entries after all.
My daughter came home with several ribbons, mainly for her arts and crafts. She taped them in a row on her newly painted bedroom wall. Now that she’s learning about money, she’s excited with the cash prizes, which typically range from about $1 to $5 in the sections we enter.

Last year, she won the prize for the oldest entry in the show. A big black-and white rosette was placed on her great-great-grandfather’s scrimshaw showing a detailed design of a sailing ship, carved on a whalebone.

As for the gingerbread cookies, I was shut out despite Mum’s tips. But I did take home a second-place ribbon for banana bread.

This year, we’ll be out of town and will miss the fair. But we’re not done yet. I’d like to enter the gingerbread cookie category again, this time sticking to the original recipe — and see if I can retire with a blue ribbon.

It’s the first sign of autumn, birds getting drunk on mountain ash berries and diving into the living room window.
More proof that drinking and diving don’t mix.

Got to love fall, particularly when the weather’s fair. Got to love fall fairs, too, particularly the traditional ones, with the 4-H displays, cow-pie bingo and dog fights at the pet parade.

September is fall fair month all over B.C., except in Kamloops, where the Provincial Winter Fair begins Sept. 23, the second day of autumn. (In Kamloops, stores erect Christmas displays in August. Back-to-school ads start running on the May long weekend.)

The Saltspring Island and Luxton fairs are on today. The Sooke Fall Fair and Cowichan Exhibition were last week. So was my favourite, Metchosin Day.

Metchosin Day has hay rides, Irish dancers and an excavator, a real one, that the kids get to dig holes with. Corn on the cob, Parry Bay lamb slow-cooked over coals, and Galloping Goose sausage with red-onion marmalade. Wasp-covered Lions sell sno-cones for a buck a pop. (Or is that lion-covered WASPs selling pop for a buck?)
Sometimes, local fairs insert local flavour. Metchosin has sheep shearing, the Comox Valley has logger sports and Saltspring has barcecued tofu. I don’t even want to know what happens on Lasqueti Island. (“Mom! I won the biggest-bud contest and came second in sensimilla!”)

On the coast, you get cedar-plank salmon. In cattle country, it’s barbecued beef and rodeos.

I once took some cousins from England to the North Thompson Fall Fair and Rodeo, where they got to see a nine-yearold boy thrown from a sheep. He landed face-down in the dirt — whump! — where he lay, motionless. “Get up, you little sissy,” boomed the voice on the PA.

I think this gave my cousins a whole new appreciation of Canadians.

The best thing about the fair is that everyone is in such a good mood, except during the judging, when you can cut the tension, if not all the pies, with a knife.

Some judging is straightforward — “Let’s try the raspberry wine again to be sure (hic!)” — while some is shrouded in mystery, with bunny-breeders or graingrowers or whoever hovering anxiously as a high priest of the arcane pokes and prods their produce like a Sotheby’s expert going at a van Gogh.

A few years ago, at the Armstrong fair, I made the mistake of asking a man in a cowboy hat how you judged hay bales. “With bullshit!” he barked, as his wife tugged nervously at his jean jacket. “They judge them with bullshit!” Turns out he had placed second in alfalfa, or whatever, and wasn’t happy about it. I think he had tractor rage.
That aside, there is something comforting, something grounding, about a country fair, wandering through the pickles and pies, the sumo-sized pumpkins and the little Silkey chickens, the ones that look like Rod Stewart in his disco phase. I’m told there are still Prairie fairs where you can win fabulous prizes by guessing the weight of the fattest guy in town. It all makes a feller want to raise a barn, or tip his hat to a lady, or maybe become Amish like in that movie Witness, only without the gunfire.

This is particularly true for those who spend their working lives behind a desk or a deadline. The farther up the corporate ladder you climb, the greater the desire to get back to the land.

I talked to my newspaper editor friend Susan Duncan last week. She said she felt great, had spent the day canning 30 quarts of peaches.

Now, I grew up down the street from Susan, have known her since I was two years old. In all this time, I have never seen her can anything other than a reporter. But it does not surprise me that she should find solace in a sealer, where the fruits of one’s labours are, well, fruit. There are no judgment calls with canned peaches, no grey areas. (If there are, don’t eat them.) Susan likes putting up preserves, I like chopping wood.
This all makes me think we would do well to hold the urban equivalent of country fairs in the city. Contests featuring Lunchables and Big Macs in place of cucumbers and cakes. Taxi-whistling instead of hog-calling. No sheep-shearing, but suit-and-tie guys could demonstrate the fine art of fleecing a customer. Needle in the haystack out, syringe in the gutter in.

Best of all: goodbye “stranger danger,” hello “howdy, neighbour.”