Photos: Dave Best
Gathering community and honouring the seasons
by Frances Morphy, Program Coordinator, Kicking Horse Culture
EmberFest is a grassroots, volunteer-powered celebration of low-tech magic and high-spirited creativity. Everyone is invited to step through the portal!
Every February, Golden comes together to celebrate creativity, community and the magic of light returning to the valley. Now in its 20th year, Kicking Horse Culture’s EmberFest, once the Snow King’s Masque Parade, has grown into a week-long celebration of art, imagination and shared possibility. The festival culminates in an outdoor community celebration in the town square with performances, fireworks and live music.
Beginning in early November and leading up to February, a group of dedicated volunteers and Kicking Horse Culture staff start meeting on a weekly basis to create a large-scale outdoor “pageant” performed for an audience of over 1,000 in Golden’s community square.
The pageant’s theme changes from year to year, depending on the ideas and contributions from a core volunteer group called the Flicker Folk. These brilliant and dedicated volunteers develop the logistics, props, narrative, concepts and performances. Anyone can come forward with an idea and bring it to life.
Because of this authentically local output of creativity, EmberFest becomes a unique portrayal of the community’s values, dreams and narratives, delivered through visual and performance arts.
EmberFest 2025: Rewild, Rejoice! Ignite Your Inner Wild Child
In February 2025, following a frightening fire season that brought too many close calls and multi-week evacuations to the areas around Golden, the Flicker Folk decided to focus their narrative on the nuances of wildfire.
Together, they created costumes and skits and spent months organizing a performance that not only spoke of the fear that fire brings, but also the rejuvenation and cyclical patterns of the natural world and our place within it as human beings. It was an ode to the longevity and inevitable patterns of nature and a desire to understand all sides of her: the red of destruction and the bright colour of regrowth.
Narrating the script were the characters Winter and Spring, two puppets that have been at the festival for many years and require three handlers each to move them around. Voiced over by volunteer narrators, these puppets stood in a fire circle and welcomed costumed performers to act in front of a crowd of many hundreds of spectators.
The 2025 pageant script was converted into a story narrative, which reads like a tale told to children at bedtime. Containing the collective wisdom of many people with vast life experiences, it is laden with the love and awe that human beings have for each other, for nature and for their home:
After dark and once each year, while a winter wind blows over the white mountains, the wild and silly creatures of Golden gather in the valley bottom. They gather in the spirit of celebration, for this is the time that they welcome their friends, Winter and Spring, down from the mountains and, with them, the changing of seasons and the return of light to the valley. They circle together, anticipating their guests and the whimsical evening ahead of them…
Read the full script here, and imagine what characters and elements might accompany the changing of seasons where you are.
EmberFest 2026: Positive Futurisms: Portals of Possibility
This year’s theme, Positive Futurisms: Portals of Possibility, invites us to imagine hopeful futures shaped by creativity and connection.
Throughout the week of February 14 to 21, 2026, workshops, performances and community art-making will spark curiosity across Golden. The culmination will be a spectacular outdoor pageant in Spirit Square featuring puppets, skits, music and stories created by community members.
Find the full lineup at kickinghorseculture.ca/emberfest.
