Calumet Island’s municipal hall was bursting with holiday cheer Sunday morning for the community’s annual Christmas market, which this year also saw the return of the Christmas brunch, a feast that hasn’t happened since before the COVID-19 pandemic.

While usually put on solely by Calumet Island’s Catholic Women’s League as a fundraiser for the club, this year’s event was hosted as a joint effort by three community groups: the CWL, the municipality’s leisure committee, and the Groupe L’Île-du-Grand-Calumet.

Joan Derouin, president of the Calumet Island Catholic Women’s League (CWL), said the leisure committee approached the club with an offer to host the brunch, which the club had been unable to do in recent years because of a lack of volunteers.

This left the CWL’s 48 members to organize the market and bake sale as a fundraiser for the club.
“This group enjoys it,” Derouin said. “People are happy to help the community and it brings us together.”
There were approximately 15 vendors in the main hall of the municipality and the tables were always busy downstairs where the leisure committee was serving up plates of toast, eggs and sausages.

“We decided to pair with the CWL to continue on the traditions that they used to do with the brunch,” said leisure committee president Tyler La Salle, explaining the money made from the 120 or so brunch plates served would be used for future recreation and leisure activities in the community.

“It’s been a while since we’ve had something like a brunch for the whole community,” he said. “I was actually surprised that people still come out to support us even though there’s probably a thousand other things going on this weekend.”

The Groupe L’Île-du-Grand-Calumet was also at the event raising funds for a new project to renovate the 178-year-old Ste-Anne Church, which stands next door to the municipal hall.

“An architect will come to look at the building. They will mark down all that needs to be done and in what order and we’ll go with that,” said Guylaine La Salle, president and co-founder of the group. She said the province has agreed to cover 70 per cent of renovation costs, and the group will work to fundraise the rest.

Mike Lamothe, one of the other founders of the group, was also sharing information about Groupe L’Île-du-Grand-Calumet’s ongoing work revitalizing the graveyard of the church’s cemetery, which so far has included building a new pavilion and installing a new bench, and is working towards installing a commemorative plaque with the names of the hundreds of people buried in the graveyard without a head stone.

“There’s about 600 that don’t have monuments,” Lamothe said. “Soon, there will be a place where [people] can go and see their ancestors.”