Quirky Local Celebrations?

This past weekend, the family headed out for the yearly Chester Greenwood Day Parade. I’m pretty sure I’ve blogged about this in the past, but for those of you not in the know, Chester Greenwood was the inventor of the earmuff, and he’s from Farmington, Maine, right where I live and work. So the first Saturday of December is always Chester Greenwood Day, and there’s always a big parade in town where everybody wears earmuffs. (Even the trucks and buses.)

We’re just cool like that.

But I wondered what other places do for quirky celebrations. I know Payson, Utah does Onion Days every year. (Having attended a few Onion Days parades myself). It celebrates the onion harvest, because . . . I guess onions were really big in Payson? (Clearly I fail at understanding why I’m watching a parade dedicated to an onion year after year.) And the whole state of Utah has Pioneer Day, celebrating the day the pioneers first entered the Salt Lake valley. (See? I did better at that one.)

So my question for you this fine Monday is what quirk celebrations do you know of in your neck of the wood? After all, that seems to be where Groundhog Day really came to life. Quirky local celebration makes the big-time. Who knows. Maybe Chester Greenwood Day will be all the rage years from now. I know the parade this year was pretty darn big. The sky’s the limit! (As long as the sky is wearing earmuffs, that is.)

1 thought on “Quirky Local Celebrations?”

  1. As a child, I grew up in Westport, Connecticut which was, in the nineteenth century, the “Onion Capitol” of the U.S., if not the world. There were large onion farms using immigrant laborers, mostly Italian, and the “Onion Canal” for transporting barges of onions to the neighboring town of Norwalk, where the onions would be put on tall ships to be distributed hither and yon. The Onion Canal remains, but the onion fields remain. The Italians remains, or at least their descendants, although Westport is now largely populated by people who commute to New York for work, the “Bronx Refugees.”

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