Winter Whiteout Begins Tonight in St. Clair

Residents of St. Clair are getting serious about saving their Winter Whiteout celebration. They are borrowing a longtime Upper Peninsula/Yooper tradition by holding a community Heikki Lunta Snow Dance at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, January 25 on Clinton Avenue in front of LaCroix’s Riverside Pub.  ”Winter Whiteout” is a special event sponsored by the St. Clair Events Committee, the St. Clair DDA, City of St. Clair and St. Clair  Chamber of Commerce and is designed to help residents and visitors kick the cabin fever blues.  The snow dance will be held immediately prior to the Winter Whiteout Kickoff, the competition for the 2012 St. Clair Poet Laureate and Bootlegger Balladeer, which will also be held at LaCroix’s.  “We are going to be hard pressed to enter the multi-city snowman building competition at this rate,” said Jody Skonieczny, executive director of the St. Clair Chamber of the Commerce. “This is just a fun way to engage the community in another small town event that promises to be fun. We don’t yet know the Heikki Lunta dance, but we will learn and teach everyone!”  Heikki Lunta is the Finnish God of Snow and Upper Peninsula communities have often conducted community Heikki Lunta dances to ask for more snow to help the region’s economy, which relies upon winter sporting activities during the cold months.  All residents of the community are invited to attend the Heikki Lunta snow dance.  The Winter Whiteout celebration will be held from Wednesday, January 25 through Saturday, January 28, with more than 15 events scheduled to take place in downtown St. Clair.  Events include both the “family friendly”, such as a snowman building contest on Saturday, to a downtown pub crawl on Friday and Saturday.