Nederland looking to return to roots with new spring festival

Mar. 23—Nederland is hoping to usher in a new tradition with a spring festival this weekend, as the town looks to fill the void left by the departure of the Frozen Dead Guy Days festival.

The inaugural Nederdays festival is set to take place Friday and Saturday, featuring sledding, silent discos, ice sculpting and hot chocolate trails.

Stephanie Andelman, consultant for event creation and implementation and a Nederland-area resident, brought the idea to the town as a way to fill the now vacant March event calendar.

"A lot of community members wanted to rally to come up with something in the winter and show town support of events," Andelman said. "It's a very positive theme, with positive vibes and our quirky rural community in the mountains keeping its character and still coming together to show support."

Andelman described the event, which is free to the public, as "like a winter carnival."

"Nederdays is a little infant event, and we just want the community to come out and play and celebrate each other," she said.

What the event is not, despite the timing, is an attempt to recreate Frozen Dead Guy Days.

"This is nothing like Frozen Dead Guy Days," Andelman said.

Andelman, who has helped in organizing past Frozen Dead Guy Days events and was involved in the event's debut in Estes Park last weekend, said she wants the traditions and feel of that festival to follow it to its new home.

"I want that spirit to live at Frozen Dead Guy Days," Andelman said. "Nederdays is about walking about town and going into businesses and having fun with your family."

The festival will help to emphasize local businesses by allowing some of them to host some of the Nederdays events, with the goal of getting attendees to buy local.

"It's meant to be quite a bit smaller and kind of geared toward locals primarily, and driving people into the businesses," said Nederland Mayor Billy Giblin. "If there was a complaint about Frozen Dead Guy Days, it brought lots of people but also food trucks and food vendors from outside the city. It really brought people away from our businesses."

Giblin said the Nederdays concept is also non-seasonal, so if its successful the town could eye holding the event more than once a year or at different times of the year.

"It's really kind of an experimental festival," Giblin said. "Ideally, we can do it at different times of the year with different themes and different events."

Added Giblin, "The spirit of it was that it was something for the town."

But Andelman did say that in some ways, the event reminds her of Frozen Dead Guy Days before it became, well, cool.

"When Frozen Dead Guy Days started, it was a lot like what Nederdays is going to be," Andelman said. "(Frozen Dead Guy Days) exploded, and it was wonderful, it really was. But we're trying to scale it back down to a community event. When you have a five- or six-hour event and a few thousand people come through, that's ideal for our town, and we can still show the character of our town. We can accommodate it."

The size of the event and a deteriorating relationship between the event's organizers and the town were some of the factors that led Frozen Dead Guy Days to leave Nederland after almost 30 years.

"I didn't mind it personally, but I definitely heard people say it was getting too big," Giblin said. "It does seem like it just kind of outgrew the town and what the town could support.

"That is definitely a big loss, but around town there is a wide range of opinions," Giblin added. "There are people who are angry that it went away, others that are sad, others that are relieved and happy and a lot of people who are indifferent and just steered clear."

So while Nederdays is not a direct replacement, Giblin said he is curious how the proximity to Frozen Dead Guy Days might impact the reception the new event receives.

"It will be interesting to see what Nederdays feels like happening the weekend after, just with what people say and think and feel after the spring when Frozen Dead Guy Days would normally be."

It might have big shoes to fill, but every tradition has to start somewhere.

"We're really concentrating on the local community coming out and supporting it, and we're really hoping this is building a foundation that we can build upon," Andelman said.

For Giblin, he just hopes Nederdays lives up to its name and gives residents a sense of community and something to look forward to after a tough year that saw the town lose its police department in addition to its most famous festival.

"There's an anxiety about just losing things it seems," Giblin said. "We've had a lot of division in the town over the last few years. I'm just hoping for a really fun event for the locals, and some cohesion and some positive, fun events. Just a positive community event that really brings people together.

"We could use a good dose of something to bring us together, which I think is a big part of the spirit of this."