By Honor Schauland
2025 is a big year for Finland Minnesota! March 15, 2025 will be the 50th Annual St. Urho’s Celebration. The theme will be St. Urho’s Golden Year: 50 Years of Grasshoppers and Grapes. Our little committee has some big plans, but we need as much help and participation as we can get.
Get involved by contacting Event Coordinator Honor Schauland at honor@friendsoffinland.org or calling 218-353-0300.
We want the 50th annual parade to be really special. We’re hoping people will go all out with their parade floats. We’d love to see classic cars, recreations of favorite parade floats from past years, or weird and wonderful things we’ve never even imagined. The St. Urho Committee is planning to offer a number of cash prizes for parade floats this year. We’re hoping folks will be inspired to start planning and building floats for 2025 now.
Along with that, we’d love to have a Miss Helmi reunion float or recognition of some kind for past Miss Helmi contestants. Please contact us if you are a past contestant willing to participate. In particular, we have incomplete information and photos from Miss Helmi contests in the 1990s and early 2000s, so if anyone has info or photos from those years we’d love to see them or hear from you.
Similarly, we’d love to have some kind of recognition some kind for past Grand Marshals of the parade. Many of them are no longer with us, but we’d still love photos or information. We have pieced together some from old photos, but we have very little information on who the Grand Marshals were in the years before 2000. If you have photos or memories to share, please contact us.
We have been working diligently to digitize photos from past St. Urho’s years with the idea of creating some kind of memory book. We are still hoping to do that, but we could use help. Please contact us if you are interested in helping or have memories to share.
Also, if you are interested in doing something special for the 50th St. Urho’s Celebration, please let us know! We welcome all ideas and suggestions.
Join the fun! Get involved by contacting Event Coordinator Honor Schauland honor@friendsoffinland.org or calling 218- 353-0300.
