Mount Pearl’s 36th annual Frosty Festival ( February 7-18TH ) raises the bar yet again, as the largest winter festival in Atlantic Canada
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For the 36th year, the Mount Pearl Frosty Festival offers up the grandest spectacle of its kind in Atlantic Canada. Running for 12 days from February 7-18, featuring 70 diverse and age inclusive events brought to you by 50 corporate sponsors, the annual Frosty Festival is the biggest winter festival in Atlantic Canada, and is showing no signs of slowing down heading towards the four decade mark.
Something For Everyone
“It feels like it was yesterday,” says festival Chairperson Keith White. “We said that when we launched. It was like god, doesn’t it feel like we just did this last month? It goes really quick.”
From the enchanting pedestrian parade of lights and cauldron lighting on opening day, to the Spirit of Newfoundland original production A Night of A Thousand Stars, to sports events and the always anticipated concert at The Glacier (this year featuring The Fables, Irish Descendants and Rum Ragged), the 70 events over the course of 12 days feature something for any age group and demographic, appeasing to all manner of taste and interest.
As White puts it, the festival is a year round production, with planning and preparation for each installment kicking off as soon as the preceding years events have concluded. It would be impossible for such a well-oiled machine to run so smoothly without the efforts of some 500 volunteers.
“We’ll start immediately after this festival ends preparing for 2019,” says White. “It’s a full 12 month process, and it’s all volunteers. It’s a volunteer organization with 500 volunteers, an 11 person volunteer board of directors, supported by 30 community groups.”
Cure-All For Winter
With our, at times, harsh and bleak winters, the Frosty Festival serves as a welcome and timely cure-all for those prolonged winter blues.
“It’s February and it’s a tough month. It’s dreary, cold and wet, it gets dark early. People are looking for something to do and we offer that,” says White. “70 events over 12 days and we offer something for everyone. A lot of our events are free, and while a number of our events are ticketed the tickets are extremely reasonably priced. That’s one of our mandates, to provide a winter festival that appeals to as many demographics as possible, keep it reasonably priced so everybody can avail of it.” 
And while residents of the town of Mount Pearl take great pride in putting off the biggest winter festival in all of Atlantic Canada, the Frosty Festival brass have made great strides to paint themselves as a province-wide gathering.
From a strong web and digital presence, complete with a brand new app and website, to a partnership with Inclusion NL, and even down to a kind and welcoming nature, Frosty Festival aims to push a come-one-come-all mandate.
“There’s a great sense of pride and community spirit in Mount Pearl,” White says. “I joke that it’s a bay town but in a big city and that’s a fair assessment. Everyone is proud to be from Mount Pearl, and for those who aren’t from Mount Pearl the door is always open. It’s a big tent and everybody is welcome. People are coming from everywhere and we want this to be more than a Mount Pearl festival. It’s more of a regional festival. We encourage everybody to come.”
For a complete schedule of events, ticket information and more visit frostyfestival.ca and all official social media accounts.