First Light Lights our Way

Sainte Marie Among the Hurons  is a re-creation of a 17^th century French Jesuit Mission in Midland, Ontario.  Built on the foundations of the original mission, Ste. Marie tells the story of the Jesuits, the French laymen who joined them and the Wendat (the French called them Huron) people who were the original inhabitants of the area. Nearly four hundred years later thousands of people come to Ste. Marie on the last weekend of November and the first two weekends of December to celebrate First Light. 

The village is surrounded by a wooden palisade and contains many small buildings that each house separate functions such as the chapel, the barn, the blacksmith, the cookhouse, living quarters and armories.  The modern main building has theatres, a museum and a restaurant. 

For First Light Ste. Marie is lit by 5000 candles in lanterns and jars.  Visitors arrive at dusk.  The entry is lit by torches and lanterns.  People bring food for the food bank which is placed in a twenty foot voyageur canoe that is eventually full to the gunwales.  Inside the theatres, local children’s and adult’s choirs sing seasonal music.  Local artisans sell their wares inside the museum for those who want to shop for Christmas gifts. There is everything from wood carving to knitting, from Indigenous artwork to preserves. The restaurant is transformed into the French Café where one can buy tourtiere, pea soup and hot apple cider.  Local Franco-Ontarian musicians entertain visitors with foot tapping French fiddle tunes.  The joie de vivre is infectious.

Going outside, one travels through the dark night along pathways edged by lanterns.  If there is snow or a full moon, the night is bright but if not, you lose your sense of time and place and simply follow the lit path.  Entering one of the rustic buildings, you are suddenly bathed in candle light and the warmth of a roaring fire in the fire place.  You may encounter a guitar player singing Christmas songs, or a Franco-Ontarian singer with a harmonica and guitar singing in French.  

Entering the chapel, you are greeted by a harpist playing old Christmas songs amidst hundreds of candles and another roaring fire.  Jean de Brefeuf who composed the Huron Christmas Carol is buried inside this building.  "Twas in the moon of wintertime, when all the birds had fled," suddenly comes to life.

Illustrations from Huron Christmas Carol book

Another building has crafts for children to make, or hot chocolate, or freshly baked cookies.  Outside, a blacksmith heats metal over a fire and then pounds it into tools, bright orange sparks flying into the night sky.  Occasionally, historical re-enactors fire off muskets nearby.  Another building is the stable with sheep and a donkey.  A crèche is appropriately set up there.

Inside the two Wendat longhouses, Indigenous drummers sing songs passed down for centuries.  Inside one of them, an Indigenous drum maker and educator, passes out drums to the kids and teaches them how to sing an Anishinaabe river song.  Sitting in the longhouse with the fire’s smoke escaping out of a hole in the roof, singing and drumming, one again loses a sense of time and place.  Being there feels timeless as your imagination allows you to be a part of history and of the present at the same time.  The drum maker, John, tells everyone when the singing has ended that now that we have sung together, we are no longer strangers.  “Feel free to be kind to one another once you leave,” he tells us.

Although we were given a paper map upon entering, it is too dark and my eyes are too old to read it.  So we simply wander around through the dark and into the light and warmth.  Back out into the cold and dark, but now there are stars above us mirroring the candles.  Once again we come into a lit building and hear more music.  At an outside area, a man is making cedar tea with white cedar branches simmered in water.  He offers us a small cup of it and the flavour is soothing, the warmth welcome.  In another building a boy hands out fruit tea while his mother supervises.  

We are well and truly lost but we don’t care.  We follow the candle edged path like a river.  It leads us into the buildings, into the longhouses and we enter and exit Indigenous, French and English culture.  We taste tea and food and flow along the river of history.  We sing, tap our feet and sometimes feel like dancing.  Hundreds of people flow along with us and everyone is polite, patient and kind.  It feels magical.

As we move along and experience the dark and the light, the cold and the warmth, the various cultures, we are changed.  We understand more about the history of this land, about the Wendat people who were eventually wiped out, about the French missionaries who were also killed and driven away and about the people who now live here and call it home.  And we are somehow, just as John said, not strangers anymore.  We have sung and drummed and walked together through the dark and the light, with  candles and stars to light our way. We just have to remember to be kind to each other out there in the river that we are all a part of.

In this high tech world of constant change, it is heart warming to see families, people of all ages, people from all across the province gathering to take part in the simple, low tech experience of sharing in First Light.

If you want to join in the feeling of this celebration you can watch these videos on youtube: Longhouse drumming and  Overview of First Light .  

Some of the food that was donated to the food bank