GOLDEN

They say that silence is golden. And I have to agree with them. Saturday night we participated in Earth Hour. And we thoroughly and completely enjoyed ourselves doing it. The event of course, received a great deal of negative press..."oh, they are just doing it for attention - it's nothing more than a publicity grab!" And well, to them I would just say that if headlines were the only reason for Earth Hour - that would be okay by me. I'm sure that neither organizer nor participant was under any grand illusions of changing the world forever with this schtick. I know that many large cities participated. I know that according to the CTV news, Vancouver saved enough to power 573 BC homes. I think that is pretty impressive.

But more impressive to me is what it was like for our family. We didn't just shut off our lights. We hit the main power breaker and cut off all electricity to the house. So with the click of a switch - there was complete silence. No furnace kicking in and out, no hum of the fridge or other appliance. Just complete and total silence. Even the kids noticed. We lit a fire in our fireplace, lit tons of candles (what would we do without those Ikea tea lites??), talked, told jokes and eventually pulled out a game. We left everything off for maybe 2 1/2 hours. It made for a peace filled evening. One of our girls commented that we should make this a Saturday night tradition. We are giving that some serious thought.

It was a worthy event - and not one cynic could point a finger at our family and sneer. I think it raised awareness in our family - and we weren't so naive heading in to the whole thing!

The experience bears repeating.