Harvest Festivals

The fam enjoying the carnival slide

Hi there!

It's summer. Let the festival season begin!

I don't mean hot and sticky desert concerts with cool hair and boho vibes... I mean the Midwest tradition that I'm affectionately calling harvest festivals.  If you grew up anywhere in small-town Midwest, I know there's no further explanation, needed.

Generally, these festivals follow a pattern, and the locals would surely say it doesn't count as a festival if it doesn't have the following:

• a parade
• a carnival
• class reunions
• a 5k race
• food trucks
• a "beverage tent" (aka. a beer garden)

Lifeguards helping push the ducks back to the
shallow end after the race

Some of my favorite things, though, are the unique and creative traditions and events. Locally, we have an event called the "Duck Run". Sadly, no live ducks are involved. Instead, hundreds of little plastic ducks (like a bathtub rubber ducky) are placed in one end of the local swimming pool and the firemen push the ducks to the other end using their fire hose (making them "run"). Before the race, locals buy numbered tickets and there are prizes if your duck makes it to the other side first. I genuinely have no idea how this began, but I love it!

The historians of my hometown have always said that our local festival, the clearly named "After Harvest Festival" began as just a party that was thrown after the local wheat harvest was finished. The town was settled mostly by German immigrants who brought over their Hard Red Winter Wheat, which is planted in the fall, lays dormant over the winter, and grows to maturity mid-summer. Our local festival is always held the third weekend in July, and these days the timing seems about right and the farmers usually are done with harvest. Demographically, the majority of residents are no longer farmers, but that doesn't keep us from having a good time!

My friend and I riding in the After Harvest Festival
parade my senior year of high school.

Broadly, I think festival season begins around Memorial Day and ends around Labor Day. If you're a Kansan, you can search the government's tourism page (travelks.com/events) to find a list of what's available.

Will you be attending a harvest festival this summer? If so, which one and are there any unique traditions or events?