5-year-old Pitt Meadows boy’s daily joke project turned into book, fundraiser

PITT MEADOWS (NEWS 1130) — On a Wednesday morning in April, five-year-old Tristan Kennedy and his mom walked out of their house and into their front yard with a mission: to make people smile. What followed was a 155-day project that has now raised more than $1,200 for charity.

In the early days after the COVID-19 pandemic was declared, Tristan was having a tough time with the fact that he couldn’t really interact with his friends and neighbours other than to wave to them through the window.

“Lots of people were walking by our house because it was one of the only safe things that we were told we could do at the time,” Tristan’s mom Naya Kohout explains.

“It was a very hard concept for him to come to terms with, that it wasn’t safe or it wasn’t allowed to go out and talk to all these people that he normally would have.”

So one morning the pair decided to hang up a joke — handwritten on a white sheet of paper, shielded from the elements by a plastic page protector, with the set-up on one side and the punchline on the back — in the yard in front of their Pitt Meadows home.

“Neither of us can actually remember exactly how or why we decided to do it. We don’t remember that spark moment,” Naya says.

“It kind of stemmed from wanting him to be able to have a connection to these people, and because they were already going past our house we said, ‘Why don’t we get a joke out there? To give people some sense of something positive to think about, or even just to distract them from everything else that they were already thinking about, and worried about.”

On the first day, the neighbourhood’s mail carrier asked Tristan how often he planned to put up a new joke.

“Even though he and I had not discussed any of that, he said immediately, ‘Every day.’ So, we started doing it every day,” Naya says.

They kept it up for 155 days, only stopping when Tristan started kindergarten in September.

Finding jokes became a community effort. Naya’s mom mailed her the joke books she had when she was a child, neighbours and passersby started sharing jokes with the mother and son.

“We would be in our living room playing and he could hear people outside reading his joke. He’d be like ‘Oh mommy! Someone’s reading our joke. What was even nicer was when people would laugh out loud,” Naya tells NEWS 1130.

“I think he realized, or I hope he realized that even doing one small little thing to try and make someone smile can have a profound impact on their day.”

Walking by the house and reading the jokes became part of people’s daily routine.

“We had daycares who would be running down the street to see which one would be the first to read the joke, and who would be able to read the answer that day. We’ve had people tell us that they changed the whole route that they walk around the neighbourhood, just to make sure that they could come by and read the joke,” Naya says.

“We had people leaving us anonymous ‘Thank You’ cards. One was a healthcare worker who said that she read it every morning before she went to work, and that it just gave her a moment of lightness. We heard of families who had relatives that were stuck abroad, and they would talk to each other and tell them the joke of the day. That was where it became very special to us.”

Each day, after she and Tristan took the joke down Naya would save the pieces of paper.

“I saw the stack kind of getting bigger and bigger and bigger, I thought, ‘How are we going to preserve this for Tristan so that he’ll be able to look back on it later in life?'”

The first thought Naya had was to create a scrapbook, something she already does as a hobby. But she wanted to be able to give copies to Tristan’s grandparents and aunts, so she decided to scan the jokes that hand’t been damaged by the sun or the rain, type out all the others and get a book printed.

“With all of the wonderful feedback we’d heard from people walking through the neighborhood, I thought maybe one of them might actually want a book.”

The initial order she placed was for 18 and Tristan was delighted when she showed it to him.

“Tristan was super excited, he has read his copy probably 100 times. There are so many wrinkles in the pages. Then when we started hand-delivering the books it was another chance for Tristan to be connected to the people that had walked by, and enjoyed it and laughed,” Naya says.

The mail carrier who inadvertently launched their 155-day project wanted a copy, and posted about it on her social media. Now, 192 copies have been sold and $1,200 has been raised.

“There was never really a concept of not giving money to charity, it was part and parcel with the theme of the book, which was to make people smile,” Naya explains.

“And if we can continue to make people smile by selling the book — then let’s do it.”

The money will be donated to the Ridge Meadows Seniors Society and the Friends in Need Foodbank.

Anyone who is interested in getting a copy of the book A Reason to Smile: Daily jokes from quarantine to kindergarten can email tristansjokebook@shaw.ca.

Listen here to Tristan’s favourite joke, which he tells to everyone to whom he delivers a book.