It’s after dark, 5 p.m., and when I walked into the Calgary Zoo, I was greeted by an enlightening path of brightly lit red and gold candy canes. The bridge had been hung with ivy-like vines of blue lights and cute shapes of kangaroos and butterflies lit up the zoo. Quite amazingly, patterns of monkeys swinging on buildings and butterflies flapping their wings are enchantingly matched with similarly shaped lights, but in different positions, that creates an atmosphere of animation and excitement. The feeling of exhilaration and childhood amazement ran through my body as my eyes were drawn to the colorful patterns of the displays of lights. They even had a choreographed flashing light display of hippos to the song, “All I want for Christmas is a Hippopotamus”!
Welcome to Zoolights at the Calgary Zoo!
Kids and adults will gape in awe at the amazing set, draping and shapes of lights that have decorated the Calgary Zoo. Events are planned throughout the Calgary Zoo for parents and their children. To keep environmental friendly this year, visitors were required to self explore the Zoo without programs. Walking around and around the paths of the Calgary Zoo, eventually, as all road once lead to Rome, all roads were on the path to the kids area.
With the “fun crew” of several Youth Volunteer Corp members, I was stationed with two other volunteers to supervise (in my opinion) the most interactive and fun activity: playing with bay of hay! Of course there were the activities centering around Styrofoam blocks and attempts to create semi-igloos, the dog sled races with crazy carpets and fun acrobatics balls enclosed in a small area, but our station was usually teeming with little tykes and energetic teenagers. With not many children coming into our area at first, my fellow volunteer and I had devised a plan to reform the placement of hay, or in other words, an easily amusing way to entertain ourselves.
These bays of hays were fantastic, as we were allowed to take off the twine restricting the hays into blocks, and mixed with the snow, the hay was extremely pliable and soft. We created a quaint rabbit hole, a hill to encourage rolling, a make-shift cave, a hay stack and a fortress. The hay stack was the most successful infrastructure that we had created, as we soon realized that while kids don’t necessarily find rolling down hills or hiding out in caves too much fun, they loved to jump and run from “alligators” that caused the utter laughter and delight. With a little ledge created by a stacked bay of hay, kids were jumping off the peak of the mountain into a even bigger mountain of soft hay.
The gurgles and delighted screams were definitely indicators of fun play, as my fellow volunteer and I had to continually push the strewn straw back into cannonball-able mounds. These innovations of ours were delightfully appreciated by the children, and adults were happy to simply throw their kids in the hay stack. I’m not entirely sure where kids find the energy to jump on hay at 7:30 p.m., or even 9 p.m., however their enthusiasm, in itself and for simple wonders, was definitely contagious. I was running around haplessly from stack piles of hay to demonstrate rolling down our constructed hill for rolling, or to supervise the jumping around the battlements of our fortress.
With downtime, my fellow volunteer and I reveled in the hay stack we had created, taking a quick rest in a most comfortable bed of straw. Steaming hot chocolate was often delivered to our volunteers, as the event did occur outside, and we were also provided the option to warm our hands and faces near an open and properly regulated fire pit, indicated by the overwhelming polar bear sign. Fortunately, it was a cool and calm winter night for the zoo, and most of the volunteers were kept quite warm by the Zoolights winter jackets we wore. (Which have very cool design stitched on the backs!)
If you have time to spare (or you want to de-stress), Zoolights is the volunteer event that is a must to attend and a great experience! Sign up at Youth Central! Time runs very fast when you are constantly running around, displacing, pushing and then placing stacks of hay for a kid’s amusement!
