The third Christmas Stroll in Riverview will be the biggest yet, with holiday fun spread over two days

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by Paul Merrigan
This Week Staff

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For the third consecutive year, local businesses will kick off the Christmas season in fine style as the Christmas Stroll takes over downtown Riverview from Nov. 27 to 28.

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While still relatively young, the event has grown in leaps and bounds since its inception in 2006, growing from a one day event to what is now two full days of events and activities for families.

"We started it with the intention of giving Riverview businesses the opportunity to highlight their products and their services fairly close to Christmas time," explains Heather Harris of the Downtown Riverview Business Association.

"We were very fortunate to win an award for it our very first year as we were recognized by Downtown New Brunswick with the Strategic Planning and Marketing Award for the activities we did during the stroll."

Aside from giving interested local businesses a chance to raise their profile during a peak shopping time, there were also other purposes behind the initial Christmas Stroll.

"The second goal we had in mind was to provide businesses the chance to say thank-you to their customers who had supported them all year," continues Heather.

"The tendency in many small towns is that people will go to the bigger centres to shop but Riverview people are very loyal to their local businesses."

At the heart of the Stroll from the beginning has been the "CANBuild a Community" project, jointly sponsored by the Downtown Riverview Business Association and Aditya Birla Minacs, which also returns this year.

In this event, local business and community groups creating self-supporting food art structures in unique designs using only canned goods.

After the judging on Nov. 28, all canned goods will be donated to the Albert County Food Bank to support their efforts to fight hunger in our area.

"The Stroll has also really been an opportunity for us to reflect on our positions within the community and find a way to give back to the community in a way that was socially responsible," says Heather.

"Each of these goals has grown and expanded a great deal since the first Christmas Stroll."

The growth of the Stroll has been seen on both sides of the event, as more citizens have taken part in planned activities and the number of participating businesses has grown from 12 to 15 in the first year, to over 40 businesses getting involved in this year's events.

"Each business has come up with something unique for their own clients and something that they thought their customers would value and the variety of things for this year is terrific," says Heather.

"One great example is The Co-operators having a Newfoundland Greeting. The owner, Alma Williams is from Newfoundland and they have some other Newfoundlanders on their staff.

"They're having an 'ugly stick' contest, which I'd never heard of before and 'even mummers are 'lowd in', according to what they tell me."

With such growth in the number of events taking place in Riverview for this years Christmas Stroll, many locals were concerned about being able to take in many of the things that interested them.

"The scavenger hunt in particular was an activity that a lot of people, especially kids, didn't have enough time to complete due to running out of time," says Heather.

"Many people said that they'd like to see it spread out over two days, so we listened to that and are giving it a try. It looks like it's going to work very well."

Seeing the growth in the Stroll from all sides of the events is a great motivator for the organizers, a small group of approximately eight people who put together the schedule of events each year.

"I think the people who live in Riverview are very proud to live here and there is a lot of community spirit," concludes Heather. "There are a lot of programs offered for families and I think this event just fits in very naturally with some of the other efforts from Riverview Parks and Rec and other groups.

"It really caters to families and it's a great way for businesses to say that they love being located here and thank you to the people of the community."

For more information, including a full schedule of events for Christmas Stroll 2008, you can visit the website at http://christmasstroll.blogspot.com.