Americans love fall festivals, which vary by region and culture. Some celebrate Halloween with haunted houses and spooky parties, while others focus on food, such as apple pies and cider. Festivals may also feature old-time music, bonfires, and local produce like peanuts, maple syrup, or oysters. Artisans sell their wares, and families enjoy the last warm weather before winter.
All over the country, Americans love festivals. Art festivals, music festivals, food celebrations – the list goes on. From a small town to a large metropolis, autumn is celebrated with festivities. The themes and styles found at a local fall festival vary widely depending largely on region, culture, and typical fall weather.
Often, a fall festival pays homage to Halloween, either as part of the celebration or as a reason. Haunted houses and spooky parties abound during the month of October. These fall festivals might feature people dressed as ghosts, all sorts of macabre mechanics, and settings that have been transformed via cotton wool and black paint into cobwebs and tombs.
Fall festivals that put food front and center might offer a pie-eating contest with apple and pumpkin pies as runaway favorites. Other typical fall appetizers include apple fritters, apple butter, and apple cider. In fact, many autumn festivals, especially in the northern states, are dedicated to the apple in all its glorious manifestations.
The apple dance and hay rides at other fall festivals give today’s youth a taste of what life was like in times past. It’s not unusual to find a fiddler or two and a banjo playing old-time mountain favorites at fall festivals as well. In colder climes, an autumn festival might end with a huge bonfire around which friends, neighbors and strangers gather, watching the mesmerizing flames dance.
Spring is the season of rebirth and fertility, and fall is the time to prepare for hibernation. Common fall festival decor focuses on dried corn stalks, stacks of pumpkins, and that old wait, the carved pumpkin. Some fall festivals feed the masses heart-warming foods, such as chili peppers and cornbread.
While there are thousands of fall festivals across the nation that celebrate the bounty and variety of the harvest, others hold a single local produce in high regard. Floresville, Texas’ famous Peanut Festival prides itself on all the things the little nut can do. Many Vermont festivals sing the praises of maple syrup and its products, such as the candies and recipes that use it. Seaside villages along the Atlantic coast take advantage of autumn to celebrate oysters.
Artisans and artists, those mainstays of festivals everywhere, flock to the fall festivals from one end of the country to the other. After the last of the fall holidays, their one big opportunity to sell their wares might be an indoor craft sale for the winter gift-giving season. Autumn festivals are great opportunities for families and friends to enjoy the last warm weather before winter arrives.
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