Pick up most Canadian souvenirs and turn them over. The maple leaf on the front rarely has much to do with where the thing was made.
Ours are cast and finished by hand in a workshop on McLeod Avenue in Fredericton, a few minutes from the Wolastoq river. That is the whole pitch. What follows is what we would actually send to someone who has left, or who is coming to visit, or who has never been.
The maple leaf, done properly
The maple leaf is the easiest symbol in the country to do badly. Cast in pewter with the veins and the serrated edge held sharp, it stops being a logo and goes back to being a leaf.
It comes as the Canadiana ornament, a brooch, and a pendant with matching earrings — the jewellery is an exact reproduction of the leaf.
The fiddlehead, which explains itself only here
Fiddleheads are the still-coiled leaves of the ostrich fern, pulled from swampy ground in spring and served with Atlantic salmon, butter, vinegar and pepper. Outside New Brunswick they need explaining. Inside it, they need no introduction at all.
We cast them as earrings, a brooch, a pendant, a spreader, a lapel pin and an enamelled memory box — and sales of them rise every spring, which tells you something about how people here feel about that fern.
Lighthouses, lobsters and the sea
Where you find a lighthouse you find a town where the tides set the pace of life. Peggy's Cove Lighthouse, built in 1868, marks the eastern entrance of St. Margarets Bay and is probably the most photographed building in Nova Scotia; we make it as an ornament, a miniature and a keytag.
Alongside it: the lighthouse bookmark, spreader and memory box, Louie the Lobster, and the Bluenose — the schooner designed by William J. Roué of Halifax whose speed made her Canada's most famous ship.
Four ornaments that each hold a province
The Stories ornaments are the ones we are proudest of, because each one is an argument rather than a picture. Sunset over the Bay of Fundy, a canoe on a wilderness river, a lobster boil on a Miscou Island beach. The dunes at Cavendish that have shifted since yesterday, and Green Gables beyond them. Bagpipes and fog horns, salt and sea. Wind roaring across the Strait of Belle Isle by the Viking site at L'Anse aux Meadows.
New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Labrador — one each, and people tend to buy the one they are from.
Closer to home still
Some pieces name one place and nothing else: the covered bridge, Uptown Saint John, Miramichi where the salmon river meets the bay, downtown Fredericton on a summer evening, the City of Halifax, Oak Island and its two centuries of treasure hunters.
These are the ones that get posted to somebody who moved away. They are small, they are flat, and they survive the mail.
Sending one somewhere
Everything ships from the workshop in Fredericton. Canadian orders are a flat $15 and free over $125. Orders to the United States are a flat US$15 and free over US$200, and our US prices include import duties — there is nothing extra to pay when the parcel arrives.
Pewter does not tarnish the way silver does, it does not break when it falls off a tree, and every piece is guaranteed for life. See everything from Atlantic Canada →