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A festival is an event ordinarily celebrated by a community and centering on some characteristic aspect of that community and its religion or traditions, often marked as a local or national holiday, mela, or eid. Next to religion and folklore, a significant origin is agricultural
On the outskirts of Mexico City, the urban municipality of Tultepec is home to more than 50% of Mexico's hand-crafted fireworks production, making it the ideal location for a huge, multi-day display of festive explosives. Originally a 19th-century celebration held by local fireworks production guilds each year on March 8 in honor of San Juan de Dios, the patron saint of fireworks makers, the present-day incarnation of the Feria de la Pirotécnia Nacional (National Pyrotechnic Festival) first sparked in 1989. Each year since, about 100,000 people have descended upon this usually quiet area for nine exciting, dangerous days in March, running, skipping, hopping, jumping and dancing through the world's most prolonged (and waiver-free) display of pyrotechnics. The festival includes three main events of powder-keg glory, as well as carnival rides, kiosks hawking regional street food, musical concerts, dance performances, and a ceremonial release of paper balloons.
Over the course of nine crisp, autumn days in the agrarian oasis of New Mexico, the azure skies above the verdant Rio Grande Valley become a surreal canvas of color during the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta.
Picture a connect-the-dots rainbow of mammoth balloons filling the sky, from the horizon to the stratosphere, while thousands of tiny-as-ants onlookers pepper the flats below. This is the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta, which takes place each year at the southern end of the fabled Sangre de Cristo Mountains, just east of Navajo country and an hour from 400-year-old Santa Fe. From the early sunrise Dawn Patrol to the evening’s “Glowdeo” parade, balloon races, and much more, this event is a spectacle of wonder for all ages. The festival is book-ended by two weekends in October with balloon die-hards holed up in Albuquerque for the entire event.
Art Basel Miami, since first launching in 2002 long after the original fair was christened in Switzerland in 1970, has created such an art ecosystem full of diversity that there’s something for just about everyone at this four-day spectacle that takes over Miami. While the epicenter is the Miami Beach Convention Center , there are dozens of off-shoots in the form of off-beat and off-center art fairs strewn throughout the city. And not all of the art is ungodly expensive. Many incredible pieces are around $1,000, which you can take home from what's become the world's most talked about art fair.
Some may dismiss Comic-Con International as a geekfest, but the true fans know that it’s four days of fun when they can meet industry stars and play in a fantasy land, all in downtown San Diego . Packed with events from autograph signings to film screenings to costume competitions (and many people show up in costume), this celebration of popular arts is a behemoth convention.
Dive into the spectacle and see what you can find. But by all means, don’t get so focused on specifics that you miss some seriously fun people watching. It’ll also give you costume ideas for future Comic-Con years.
Every Cinco de Mayo, thousands of students, military, charros, and public-safety personnel march alongside a wealth of colorful floats in the state’s annual parade. Some details change from year to year, but the one thing that remains constant is the length of the parade. It begins around 11 am, and can last for hours. It’s always good to spend some time watching the parade live, because unless you come from a country or region where you regularly view military parades, it’s a sight to see. But after a few hours in the sun, pack it up and retire to an outdoor table at a restaurant and watch the rest on flat-screen TVs that are scattered around.
The polo fields of nondescript Indio in the Southern California desert transform each spring into one of the world’s most sought-after musical playgrounds when The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Annual Festival comes to town. The main draw has always been Coachella’s pull as a music festival , with a diverse lineup ranging from the hipandupandcoming to the absolute monsters of rock. Today, this hot festival has become a monster of its own, typically described as just “Coachella.”
It’s a little bit of everything from large scale art installations, which double as creative ways to beat the merciless sun, to the infamous danceathon Sahara Tent and the king-making main stage where the next day's music news is made. Festival junkies turn out en masse with a distinct vibe that is uniquely Southern California: incognito Hollywood stars and models, tattooed hipsters, EL wire-lined ravers, DayGlo-clad teens, and flip-flop-wearing beach bums who are all there all soak up the desert sunshine. "Beautiful" is a great word to describe the experience, from the people to the backdrop (palm trees and desert mountains), and the musical itself.
Bumbershoot is a three-day, nearly all encompassing conglomeration.
There's the standard large line-up of musical acts performing on multiple stages over American Labor Day holiday weekend, but the festival also highlights stand-up comedians, literature, theater, film, visual arts, history, pop culture, and so much more—all with a focus on Seattle and the Pacific Northwest whenever possible.
Literature is explored through Words & Ideas. Bloggers, authors, novelists—even entire writing teams from television shows—present lectures and panels on pop culture and writing. One particularly popular series is the “Why This? Why That? Why Now?” where each day a moderator explores hilarious and odd topics like Why YOLO? Why Zombies? and Why Board Games?.
As the founding legend is told, in 1986 Larry Harvey and a dozen friends burned an effigy of a man on San Francisco's Baker Beach in a cathartic act of spontaneous creativity. This experience of reconciliation and rebirth quickly grew into an annual ritual with hundreds of people, leading Harvey to move his Burning Man experience to U.S. government land in northern Nevada’s remote Black Rock desert. Today, this is where 70,000 people gather the week leading up the Labor Day, transforming one of the least hospitable pieces of land on Earth into a loving, hospitable temporary village called Black Rock City. At its heart, Burning Man is a celebration of artistic self-expression for those who have a utopian vision of the world. For some it’s about creating a spiritual sense of oneness in an intentional community based upon 10 principles . For others, it’s about all-night parties and dancing, riding around naked on bikes and participating in the Slut Olympics (yes, this is one of hundreds of events).
It may drive the organizer in your crew crazy, but at Calle Ocho, all you have to worry about is walking 23 city blocks, listening to great music and eating amazing food. Certainly, the beverages count, as well, but you can see how simple it all is. That’s how life should be. Additional events during the entire festival of Carnaval Miami and Calle Ocho include a Miss Carnaval Miami pageant, a Carnaval Miami run, cooking contest, domino tournament, golf classic and soccer games. The events generally take place during the two weekends (and week in between them), however the pageant and run are often before the major festivities begin.
Dance culture has long been celebrated in Europe, and it’s finally coming into its own here in the States. While some DJs still use turntables and vinyl, this is mostly a laptop-controlled showcase in the art of sound. It all started in 1997 at the Shrine Expo Hall of Los Angeles as the rave love-child of local event promoters. Since 2011 its most permanent home has been the immense Las Vegas Motor Speedway, allowing Electric Daisy Carnival to expand and evolve into a huge adult amusement park (Disneyland on acid). Insomniac Events are the company behind Electric Daisy Carnival and they've made an unflinching commitment to booking renowned electronic acts and presenting them with top-notch production standards including mind-warping visuals and pyrotechnics. This is dance music presented on a grand scale for people who like it big and bold.
Firefly made a big splash onto the scene in 2012 with ambitions to be the biggest music festival on the East Coast—providing people with a festing destination on par with Coachella, produced by the Chicago-based company Red Frog Events, which also puts together Warrior Dash and American Beer Classic. Firefly aims to entertain music fans of all types and genres, although it definitely skews toward young and trendy; you’re not necessarily likely to see multi-generational crowds here. When organizers got together to imagine what a quintessential summer night of outdoor music would entail, fireflies (a.k.a. lightning bugs, depending on where you’re from) kept coming up as part of that experience. There’s something nostalgic about catching a bug in a jar, evokes carefree summer days. And thus, the name—and a festival—was born.
The bizarre lore behind Grandpa Bredo sparked the three-day festival , which has been held annually since 2000. The saga began when Grandpa Bredo's family decided after his death at age 89 to preserve the body in dry ice and ship it to a cryonics facility in the U.S. He rested there in liquid nitrogen until grandson Trygve Bauge had the body moved to Nederland to be with him and his mother, Aud Morstoel. They planned to start a cryonics facility with Grandpa Bredo as their first member, hoping that future technology would lead to corpse “re-animation” and cures for what ailed them.