Keene's pumpkin festival, once squashed, will return this year after all

Aug. 23—Plans for a return of Keene's pumpkin festival — once squashed — are now aglow again.

Just weeks after postponing the festival to 2023, Let It Shine, the organization behind the event, has announced that it is working with a group of downtown businesses to move forward this year with a smaller "Gathering of the Gourds."

"This will really just be a community-based festival," Mike Giacomo, the interim president of Let It Shine said in a phone interview Tuesday. "We're not really trying to attract people from Boston to come; this is about the region."

This year's festival, slated for Saturday, Oct. 22, will mark the first time the event has returned to Keene's downtown since 2019. In 2020, the festival was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and in September of that year, board members of Let It Shine announced they were ready to pass the torch to other community members.

Afterward, a new group of volunteers joined Let It Shine, with plans to restart and revitalize the festival in 2022. The City Council approved a request from organizers in April to use city property for the revamped festival this October. Giacomo said the festival still has the go-ahead from the city.

The tradition — which had drawn thousands of people and set the Guinness World Record for the most lit jack-o'-lanterns in years past — will be more akin this year to its beginning in 1991 as a small community event, according to Giacomo.

Central Square will not be closed off to traffic, there will be no giant tower of pumpkins, and the focus will be on hosting a family-friendly event that Keene can be proud of, he said.

This year's festival — which will include trick-or-treating for children at local businesses, pumpkin carving contests and much more — was brought back from the dead after an outcry from the community, he said.

Earlier this month, Let It Shine said the festival would be canceled because two key members of its board had to step down suddenly for personal reasons. The board determined at the time that it would be too difficult to put on large festivities on such short notice, Giacomo said.

But as community members reached out to express their disappointment, plans for a smaller festival began to take shape with help from the Keene Downtown Group, which is composed largely of downtown business owners, he said.

Brandie Wells, who owns Soul and Shadow Emporium on Main Street, spearheaded the downtown group's involvement in this year's festival. She said she had already hired a DJ and had plans to host a psychic and wellness fair to coincide with the festival, when Let It Shine initially canceled the event.

"I just feel that it is important once you put something out there to implement this gathering," Well said. "Even if it's on a smaller scale; it's just beautiful in downtown Keene, especially in the fall. There's nothing like it."

With fortune readers and mystic healers, the psychic and wellness fair will be held the same day as the festival. A local disc jockey, CJ the DJ, whom Wells hired, will be playing music in Central Square, where pumpkin carving contests will be held, she said. Other vendors and artisans will be set up in the Gilbo Avenue lot alongside the Southern Vermont History Museum, which will exhibit live animals, including owls.

"We're really just trying to create a local event that is meaningful," Wells said.

Even before the pandemic canceled the Pumpkin Festival in 2020, the event had been scaled down from years when pumpkins and crowds dominated most of downtown. In 2014, parties outside the festival escalated to rioting, resulting in vandalism, injuries and dozens of arrests. The next year, City Council voted not to grant Let It Shine a license to hold the event and smaller festivals returned to Keene beginning in 2017.

With a smaller festival this year, attendees are not being asked to bring their own pumpkins and jack-o'-lanterns, Giacomo said. Rather, pumpkins will be provided and, to make cleanup easier on the organizers, people will be encouraged to take their gourds home with them.

The event organizers will also be soliciting feedback from attendees through a survey to find out what parts of the Pumpkin Festival people loved most and how the best aspects of the event can be brought back in future years.

"If people are interested and they really are as passionate about this festival as they sound [like] they are, let us know," Giacomo said. "These kinds of events really do take a community."

Anyone interested in joining the Let It Shine board or helping to plan the 2023 festival can email KeenePumpkinFest@gmail.com or message the organization's Facebook page at www.facebook.com/keenepumpkinfestival.

Ryan Spencer can be reached at 352-1234, extension 1412, or rspencer@keenesentinel.com. Follow him on Twitter at @rspencerKS