Remembrance Day will carry some extra weight in Fort Smith this year.
Back in January, a plane crashed near the community, leaving six people dead. Many residents will be thinking of those that were lost in that tragic accident this Nov. 11, as well as the Canadian Rangers who dutifully assisted in the search for the crash site.
"We want to highlight that as part of the service," said Father Aaron Solberg, the priest at St John's Anglican Church and one of the organizers of the community's Remembrance Day ceremony. "That event, obviously, was right here, present, at home. That has impacted the tone of remembering."
Of course, Fort Smith's Remembrance Day ceremony will also honour the numerous men and women who have served the country at home and abroad.
"We have a beautiful service planned," Solberg said. "It's going to be absolutely amazing. We're going to be in the Salt River [First Nation] conference building, which is a gorgeous venue SA国际影视传媒� one of the very nice venues here in town. We'll have a whole array of speakers. Our new mayor [Dana Fergusson] will be speaking. We'll have our Legion president speaking. I'll be speaking shortly. We're going to try to highlight the veterans of this community by name and picture as much as we can.
"We'll have some live music... We'll even have a trumpet player to do the Last Post."
It will be Solberg's second year as an organizer of Fort Smith's Remembrance Day ceremony. Last year's event was a success, he said, and he expects and he expects solid attendance again this year.
"Last year was a wonderful turnout," he said. "We had the Rangers, the air cadets, parks, the SA国际影视传媒� they were all represented in the flag parade.
"[This year] we'll do a parade from the event to the Legion Hall, where we'll have lunch... It's wonderful to see that flag parade come through. You have the green of the parks, the red of the , the blue of the air cadets. It's just a beautiful array of the colours of all the kinds of service we have in this community."
Ultimately, Solberg hopes this year's ceremony will give Fort Smith residents the chance to honour the people who served the country in conflicts past, and those who continue to be stationed in regions that admittedly feel a world away from the town of 2,200.
"When the world decided to become a more unified place, or tried to become a more unified place after the first two world wars, Canada played a very important part in that," he said. "That unity and that working together across the world allowed for certain values to be continued and to be supported. Canadians, Americans, we fought for those values.
"If you live in a small place like Fort Smith, sometimes you don't necessarily see that. You see it in a history book, maybe in a news story, but even Yellowknife is far away. Edmonton is far away. It's easy to forget about Ukraine or forget about Israel and Gaza or Sudan. Those places are a week, two weeks travel from us, even in this modern world. We're so distant from war, from the battles, from the evil versus good in the world. This Remembrance Day, we remember that our people, our families, our brothers, our sisters, our cousins, our parents, our grandparents, they have, and they are sacrificing their lives for a better world.
"We thank them for their service. We understand that their service allows for us to live in a free and prosperous country."
