Category Archives: Membership

Southern Yarn Nov-Dec 2025

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The Southern Yarn is once again ready for your enjoyment. It will be in the collection on our Yarns page, as well as via the image here. Thanks for sticking with us through our 75th anniversary in 2025 and we look forward to the year ahead with you.

Here’s Charlie’s editorial to get you started…

Many of you know, of course, that our Down Under Club meets for several of our events in the Scandinavian Cultural Centre. This has been a happy and convenient arrangement for many years now. For those who haven’t been there, we meet upstairs in a central open area adjoining the kitchen. Around that area are five other rooms dedicated for each of the SCC member countries – Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland and Iceland. Those rooms are mini-museums and serve to help keep their cultures alive and educate and entertain the public, especially during Folklorama.

This year marks 150 years of settlement by the Icelanders in Manitoba. The Winnipeg Free Press has recently run a few nods to this major milestone. A good one to read is “Icelanders’ Manitoba saga marks Year 150”, by Conrad Sweatman (WFP 16Oct2025).

Meanwhile, as we’ve been highlighting throughout the year in the Yarn, our little Club has been celebrating 75 years! We will reflect on this achievement at our upcoming AGM – hopefully there will be a good turnout to help inform our start for the next 75.

In this issue there is the usual mix of Club news, travel, remembrance, trivia and birding. Thank you to my editorial assistants Jenny and Brian and our other contributors and advertisers. And, in case you have wondered – yes, we do make extensive use of AI to produce the Yarn — Actual Intelligence. 😊

Yarn September October 2025

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We recently had a road trip to Cleveland, Ohio, and enjoyed some great sights, sites and scenery going and coming. But in all seven states through which we passed, smoky skies reminded us of the northern Manitoba bushfires.

Over 2 million hectares are affected, making them the worst on record. Which is why it was heartening to learn of the assistance from Kiwi and Aussie firefighting teams [July 13, 2025]:

“Fire and Emergency New Zealand deployed an additional 43-person taskforce to Manitoba, Canada, to bolster the local response to more than 500 actives wildfires currently burning in the region.

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Southern Yarn July/August 2025

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The Yarn is once again ready for your reading pleasure.

If I had a bucket list, it would now be one item shorter: I got to witness the “Toast to the Haggis”! This rare excitement came about while volunteering (mostly flipping pancakes) at the 57th Manitoba Highland Gathering last month in East Selkirk.

Selkirk is an apt choice for hosting this event as it was named for Lord Selkirk, who sponsored the Scottish settlers to the area in the early 1800s. [read more: www.lordselkirk.ca/the-settlers]. Congratulations to Margaret Walker and her team for pulling all the bits together that make the Gathering such a culturally significant event. It was fun and also an opportunity for Judy and me to make good use of our little Boler camper for its first outing this year.

In fact, the Selkirk campground was the perfect spot. One of the birding trails brought me within good range of a couple of good specimens – a great blue heron and a bald eagle (see p. 8).

Thanks again to those who contributed other articles of significance in this issue – Sam Dawson for the Club gathering at OEB (p. 1), Jenny Gates for our proud moment in the Legislature (p. 3), Michael Workman for the AFL report (p. 7), and everyone for our Club’s memories and reflections (p. 6).

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