Original Published on Jul 20, 2022 at 09:03

By Ian Croft, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

With the town of Taber continuing to grow, many people working within the town continuously endeavour into making it a better place to live and now, the town is focusing on providing some more events for the community. 

Both Emily Hembrough, Art, Culture and Events Coordinator at the Town of Taber, and Meghan Brennan Communications and Projects Coordinator, are putting together a new event in September for the whole family to enjoy. 

“The Wonders of Wizardy, or Wow for short,” said Hembrough. “September 10 is the big day. It is a magical festival for all. It is going to be a full day of a ton of different events that are geared towards all different age groups, so we hope to have families come in and everybody and anybody come to this event and have an exciting full day of magical experiences. We love costumes, we love when people dress up and come excited, and ready to participate. Everything is free except for the one paid  portion of the day which is the feast. The whole morning and afternoon is all free, the feast will be a ticketed event because we can only fit so many people. That will be posted until probably mid-August. So you just have to keep an eye open for when we open the tickets, but everything else is free and there will be more to come.” 

“We’re encouraging people to watch our website very, very closely that’s where all the information, event details will be posted it’s taber.ca/magic to make it easy for everybody,” said Brennan. 

“We’re calling it the Wonders of Wizardy so it’s obviously a wizard and magic-inspired festival, it’s a brand new event for  our community we’re just trying to bring some nostalgia, and whimsy to the fall season in our community. There are not a great many events that happen post-summer in Taber, so this is just another thing that our ACE coordinator wants to add to bring people to our community, and to get together and enjoy something. This festival really is made for everybody and we are inclusive of everybody and encourage every single person to come and get dressed up and enjoy the day. Be inspired by magic and wizardry, and just enchantment in general. It’s just a fun family festival.” 

Hembrough went into more detail about what people can expect from this new event. 

“I don’t have the timeline nailed down perfectly yet it will be on our website but we are doing a mystical market, we are going to be looking for vendors for that,” said Hembrough. “We will be doing a Tri-Taber-Tournament that people can register to participate in, more information on this to come. The Youth Do Crew is hosting Broom Ball. (A Wizarding sporting event where you ride on a broomstick.) We’re hoping to have a costume contest with a few categories. The Grand Feast will be the only ticket event — that’s the only pay event. There will be photo opportunities throughout the event that again are free. We’re hop- ing to have food trucks. We are looking for food trucks, but we’re specifically looking for food trucks that can theme, or that can go with our theme of the mystical magical wizardry.” 

Hembrough also talked about how important the community’s excitement and enthusiasm for these events are. 

“With this being a first- time event, we definitely want people to come out and get excited about it because their excitement means that we can run these events continually year after year,” said Brennan. “Make them better and bigger, and grander than they were before, but we can only do that if the public engages and comes out and tells their friends and family to come out and enjoy the day. We’re really, really looking forward to having the public engagement on this one.” 

This item reprinted with permission from The Times, Taber, Alberta