Our Lantern Festival has now come and gone. It’s the biggest celebration of the year in our little town, and the event really brings the best out in everyone. The whole town is in a great mood leading up to the 3.5 day party, which starts on Friday night and closes with a big firework celebration on Monday evening. Everyone buzzes around the weeks before the fest, prettying up their homes, decorating with lights and lanterns, and actually being friendly to each other on the street. The latter is an especially unusual thing here in Hessen, because the people tend to be reserved and friendly only to those they know and like.

Instead of my usual rundown of the events and the parade, I thought it would be fun to turn this into a top ten list of Laternenfest goodness.

1. The town just looks so good when it’s all cleaned up and decorated for the fest. Lights decorate the Rathaus and the main street. Plus they close the streets off for a good part of Saturday and Sunday evenings which really makes it nice.

2. The bands that come to play and march in the parade are really good. In fact, one of the bands is a championship marching band in Germany — and they really are awesome.

3. We blew up balloons which Mackenzie totally loved –and Ayla was extremely disturbed about. You would have thought that we were trying to inflate the dog with the way she was reacting.

4. Another great thing about Laternenfest is the friends and family we get to celebrate with, from around our village and those who travel to be with us.

5. The characters present in the parade are not to be missed. Such as the Bauer Lenz who drives the entire route while standing on the seat of his tractor and steering with his foot. He’s got a farm nearby and we just found out that they slaughter their own pigs and cows so we’ll be going to check out their offerings very soon.

6. I’m just amazed by the amount of work that these groups (pretty much all volunteers and a lot of them just groups created for fun to participate in this event) put into their floats. Some of them must take them months of time to put together — and all for two nights of touring the city in. But oh, what a fantastic two nights it is!

7. What parade would be complete without fire breathers? I honestly have no idea how this guy keeps it up for almost 2 hours.

8. The queens. Ah, what fun to look at the royalty. 🙂 Our own Lantern Queen actually has to have been born here and after being in a few pageants in high school, I can hardly imagine what sort of crazy politics are involved in this selection process.

9. The carousel, a new favorite for us. Mackenzie got to ride on the little kids carousel for the first time this year (we didn’t realize that she could have ridden it last year also since adults are welcome to accompany the little passengers). She sat in the fire truck (her favorite of the cars on there) totally still, gripping the hand rail — but the second she got off, she wanted to get right back on. The adults could only take so much spinning in a circle though. Talk about feeling sick. as. a. dog. Whew.

10. Getting totally soaked. This is our first year where we didn’t have absolutely perfect weather at Laternenfest — and we also managed to get washed out at the fair grounds which was interesting. We had gone up there with two of our regular fest attendees, Ayla and Mack — and thought the weather would hold until it began to fall a flood. I have never seen Ayla look more unhappy. We got drenched, more than once…and we thought everything would be fine until the water level under our table started to rise….

That’s when Ayla decided she’d had enough and had to get up on the beer benches with us! Let’s just say, we got some pretty strange looks — but we were all so wet, we just didn’t even care. And all Mack could talk about was getting back on the fire truck. Definitely a moment we will remember and talk about for many years to come! 😉

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