An event that was to celebrate the centennial milestone of a west central community, has been cancelled due to safety precautions surrounding COVID-19. Eatonia’s Centennial Celebration, which was to take place this August long weekend, will be postponed until – hopefully, 2021.

Lindsay Larock, along with 12 other committee members have been hard at work putting all the pieces of the celebration together for the last three years and although she said it is unfortunate, it was a decision made for the right reasons.

“With the public health orders, we just didn’t feel, even by August, that we would be able to move ahead with the event and have it be what we’ve worked for the past three years for it to be – people from Alberta and BC were going to make the trip out and for safety reasons, we all agreed it needed to be postponed,” said Larock.

Upwards of 800 people is what the event was expected to bring out and as Larock stated, that included people from our neighbouring provinces and even though Saskatchewan may be doing a good job on flattening the curve, other provinces haven’t reported the same statistics.

“This event is going to be so great and we don’t want anyone to miss out on it – even though a centennial celebration on year late may be mean us getting a little creative with our marketing – the event itself will be everything we wanted it to be... just a little behind schedule.”

Larock laughed as she said called it the “Eatonia Centennial – Plus One”, but said it is still set to have all the fun and community connectivity as is was going to this year as they had planned a jam-packed schedule throughout the long weekend with activities booked from 9am to 2am.

Three years of planning also meant three years of fundraising. Thanks to the Ballroom Blitz event along with a few pancake breakfasts and other generous donations, the committee was able to raise close to $100,000.

Those who purchased tickets for the catered events can visit eatonia2020.ca to find details on refunds if they are not able to attend next year.

The committee will now take a break until September when they will resume meetings and assess the state of the pandemic and public health orders at that time and create a plan to move forward.

Larock said she wanted to give a heartfelt thank you to all of the people who contributed to the fundraising and all the committee members for their hard work over the last three years. She said she looks forward to resuming the planning process in the fall and is still very excited to bring the event to Eatonia.