Local residents started receiving invitations this week to a Facebook event page titled “The Search for Spring in Park Rapids.”
Administered by Park Rapids Library branch manager Jodi Schultz and local working mom Megan Hafner, the page explains the Search for Spring as “an event for the whole community to participate in.”
The page invites families to put spring decorations in their windows or porches visible from the road, incorporating a green ribbon to indicate that they are participating in the event.
“This allows families with children to go on a scavenger hunt looking for spring while maintaining social distancing,” the blurb goes on. “We encourage you to participate in both decorating and the scavenger hunt. You may also post and share pictures of you and your family participating” in the event.
Hafner and Schultz, who do not personally know each other, took charge of the idea when someone mentioned it on a Facebook group related to the COVID-19 quarantine.
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“It’s just a very spur-of-the-moment thing that was thrown together,” said Schulz. “One person on Facebook commented that her hometown, I think in Ohio, was doing this drive-by egg hunt, and then she said it would be a neat thing to do around here, but for some different reasons, she didn’t have time to organize anything like that.”
“I said I would do it if I could get somebody to help me, because it seemed like a lot of work for one person,” Hafner added in a separate phone interview. “It really hasn’t been a lot of work, because Jodi helped me. She gave me some ideas of ways to do it that weren’t going to be a lot of work.”
Schultz said brainstorming for the event moved quickly via instant messaging, recalling that Hafner set up the Facebook event and made both of them administrators – “That way, we’ll just try to spread the word, and if people think it would be a fun thing to do, they can join in.”
The event is simple compared to how it would have been organized a couple months ago, before social distancing guidelines were introduced, Schultz said.
“We would have a master map of the project, and who was participating, and that kind of thing,” she said. Instead, she told Hafner, “I feel like at this point in time, simplicity is our friend. Maybe there’s a way to just make a thing like this happen, really without a lot of organization.”
Each household can decide what to include in their display.
“I said ... instead of just saying, ‘Put an egg in your window,’ and making it really specific, it might be fun to make it more just a spring thing, so that some people might decide if they have a covered porch or something, to even put a stuffed animal with a green ribbon out,” said Schultz. “People can do some creative things. It’s fun to see that. We thought it might be fun to just give people some freedom to do it however they want to do it.”
“I used to be heavily involved in the Easter egg hunt at the Nazarene Church in town, back when Bill and April Hodge ran it,” said Hafner. “It was something I enjoyed doing. … I wanted to give kids something to look forward to this spring, because they’re all stuck at home. Usually, they get out and do an Easter egg hunt, but you can’t do that this year. So, I wanted to give them something that they could do.”
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“We thought it might be a fun way for people to let each other know that they’re thinking about each other, and have some human contact in a different way,” said Schultz.
