The temperatures may have been cold – but with pancakes, breakfast meats and plenty of other foods to choose from, nobody cared.
The 51st-annual Elmira Maple Syrup Festival brought a crowd of thousands to the community’s downtown, even as temperatures spent the morning hovering around -10 C and failed to break past freezing during the afternoon hours.
“As long as the sun’s out, it makes a big difference,” said Cheryl Boyd, a longtime festival volunteer.
Boyd said Saturday’s festival was one of the coldest she’d seen in her 18 years of involvement.
Still, it seemed as though few noticed.
“It’s nice and sunny, which is nice this year,” said Jennifer Carter, who drove in from Guelph for the festival.
“It’s a lot of fun. It’s an awful lot of fun,” added friend Noelle Hakim.
Saturday marked Hakim’s first time at the festival.
It was far from her first brush with maple syrup, as she made it as a kid while growing up in Wellington County.
An estimated 680 gallons of syrup were used at the festival, as well as an estimated 180 kilograms of batter.
Much of that batter was made by Rick Weber and his son.
Weber’s grandfather was one of the festival’s first batter-makers, and the tradition has been passed through the family ever since.
“We have this old machine that we mix with. It’s probably 40 years old, and it just pounds away all day long,” he said.
Weber’s work doesn’t go unnoticed.
Asked what her highlight of the festival was, Jennifer Carter had an immediate reply.
“It’s absolutely the pancakes,” she said.
“(We have) a competition to see who can eat the most, but my husband always wins.”
Disaster almost struck early Saturday morning, when Weber and the other batter-makers arrived to find that their water lines had frozen.
The group was able to find water elsewhere, and keep mixing their secret recipe as if nothing had ever happened.
Profits from the event, which is billed as the world’s largest single-day maple syrup festival, are used to help local organizations.
