Hi Folks:

This being the first Saturday in July, as you’re likely well aware, today is International Free Hugs Day! If you’re lucky enough to live here, today is also Canada Day! 🇨🇦

To that end we thought we’d combine the celebrations and take our sidewalk chalk down to our old hugging spot at the Homecoming Memorial. For full disclosure, we scanned the Canada flag image into the computer and used CorelDraw to create and print out the template.

We had fun making the drawing and interacting with those who stopped to chat, and when we were finished cleaning up, we retired to a nearby bench to people watch. While it felt a little strange not to be there with our FREE HUGS posters, in the short time we were there we were immensely gratified to see people stop to photograph the hugging spot and even more so to watch two couples and a group of three engage in hugs at our hugging spot! We know our hugging tree (a western white pine) was also happy to witness these events.

Speaking of our hugging tree, the oldest image we have is from July 2, 2011. At that time our tree was a sapling, barely reaching the top of the fence:

Eleven years later, you may notice that our tree has grown, just a little bit. We’ve been feeding them love, hugs and gentle needle caresses for 14 years.

Same hat, same jacket, same beautiful smile. 🙂

We had such fun downtown that we decided to use the same pattern to update the hugging spot in front of our house.

So, if you’re in Canada, help us celebrate Canada Day and International Free Hugs Day by hugging the ones you love! Today and every day…

Hugs,
M&M