Festival

If you want to experience small town America, go to a festival.

Around these parts -usually in the Spring or Fall-there is a festival heralding the virtues of the town in question. Not only is there the requisite number of food vendors, musicians, and politickin’, there are arts and crafts. Usually this is light on the art and heavy on the crafts-meaning you’ll find a lot of crocheted doll clothes, homemade whirly gigs, and lots of denim with lace sewn on it. But then again, who’s to say its not art?

Now don’t think for a minute I’m looking down my nose at these activities. They are the backbone of our society-eliciting town pride and allowing chance meetings with friends and relatives you haven’t seen since, well, last year at the same event. I am first in line to road trip to various festivals wandering in and out of booths, munching on fresh kettle corn and sampling just made jams and pumpkin butters.

In the Spring, my own hometown has Sucker Day. Lest you confuse that for a lollipop, let me set you straight. A sucker is a fish. It’s an ugly, but tasty fish that used to run plentiful in the rivers of these parts. The whole town gets together on Saturday for a huge fish fry. Back in the day, kids got Friday before Sucker Day out of school and everyone went sucker grabbin’.

Nowadays the sucker is few and far between and the kids no longer get Friday off (mainly because they don’t want to go grab suckers) but we still fry fish, set up booths, listen to music, and play games.

But the Friday night before-what I look forward to most-is the parade. With the Sucker queen and her court gracefully passing by in her Daddy’s convertible.

Along with all the other trappings of these small town gatherings another vital ingredient is the parade. That will be the subject of my next post. That or marching bands. I can't decide.

I love me a parade.

And, yes, I own a doll with crocheted clothes. You doubted it?