Pumpkin Festival to keep downtown location, Halloweekend dates

LACONIA — The New Hampshire Pumpkin Festival will be held Halloween weekend, Oct. 27-28, and, notably, remain downtown. After a two-year pandemic-precipitated pause, and fundraising struggles last year that forced a scaled-back iteration, the street festival is returning to a two-day event. 

“We believe this festival is really important to the vitality of our region,” said Lakes Region Chamber of Commerce President Karmen Gifford, who has organized the festival since 2016. “We’re really excited to bring it back to two days and to be downtown.”

Gifford had previously discussed a possibility that the festival be moved to another location in the region, such as the Weirs.

The event’s hallmark pumpkin tower, pulled last year due to insufficient funding and manpower, is a goal — but not a definite — for this year’s event. 

“We would love to bring the tower back,” Gifford said, but it needs a location big and flat enough to support it, more than four hours of manpower to both set it up and break it down and at least 2,000 pumpkins carved in advance. It also carries a $15,000 price tag. 

Last year, when the festival made its return, many attendees said the tower’s absence was a big detractor to their experience. One longtime attendee remarked that it was “a Pumpkin Festival with hardly any pumpkins.”

In lieu of a pumpkin tower, the 2022 festival adorned Rotary Park with jack-o-lanterns carved by students of Laconia schools. 

Challenges with even that scaled-down effort demonstrate how convening and organizing on-the-ground support and volunteers, beyond just general enthusiasm, is easier said than done. 

Initially, “We had a principal at one of the elementary schools in a small car that, one carload at a time, was bringing 300 pumpkins that were carved by those students" to downtown, Gifford said. Local businesses stepped in with personal and borrowed pickup trucks to complete the transport.

To accomplish a feat like the pumpkin tower, Gifford said, “That's when we really need the community to step up and help us to make that happen” in advance. “We're open to all of it, but it takes more than one person, it takes more than two people.”

“Someone said at one point, ‘Well, they don't have pumpkins,’ and our response is, ‘Who is they?’” Gifford said. “‘They’ is our community. If we are going to put 1,000 or 2,000 pumpkins on a tower, who's going to carve them?”

Last year’s single-day event was a step toward the festival reestablishing itself after its hiatus, a process this year’s occasion will take to the next level. 

“What we're sort of talking about is ‘What is the event going to look like going forward?’” Gifford said. 

Last year, with funding shortfalls over the summer, Gifford felt she had no choice but to cancel the festival. An outcry prompted a reversal of that decision, but, short on time and resources, it had to be downsized.

The festival began its outreach to stakeholders and potential sponsors for this year in January, including both local businesses and potential corporate sponsors. The feedback from downtown businesses about last year’s festival, Gifford said, is a critical part of shaping plans for this year. 

With the return to the grandiosity of a two-day function, and ensuring an early ramp up of outreach, the festival may be able to hit the high marks it set in its first few years, while incorporating highlights from last year.

“Last year being one day it was harder, because it wasn't quite big enough for some of that larger, corporate money. So we ended up doing a lot of more work to generate smaller numbers to get to the number we needed to offset the cost,” Gifford said. “I think the bigger the event is, the more attractive it is.” 

Having the festival near Halloween and featuring the costumes of both vendors and attendees is a trend here to stay, Gifford said. The kids costume parade last year will make a bold return, and the festival’s later date, the weekend before the spooky holiday, will likely be the festival’s weekend for the foreseeable future. 

What the festival can offer is directly dependent on the sponsorship it garners and the commitments it gets in advance.

“There's a price tag on those types of attractions that come in,” Gifford said. “But the more that we raise the more elements we can have.” Gifford encouraged any businesses, groups or individuals that want to get involved, be a sponsor or even suggest an idea to reach out now. 

“We need that collaboration and that communication to happen over the next couple of months,” Gifford emphasized. “In September and October, it's late.”

Laconia City Councilors have been vocal about their belief that the festival is a jewel of the city and should stay downtown, and support that belief with an assertion that the city should support festival organizers. 

“One of the things the council has consistently said is not only that they would like to see the city take a larger or more active role in it — which isn't necessarily defined, whether it be financial or otherwise,” City Manager Kirk Beattie said. “They want to show that they really like having this and want to continue to have it be a successful event.”

Melissa Aupperle, general manager of Recycle Percussion's CAKE Theatre downtown, will help coordinate volunteers and outreach to local businesses both downtown and elsewhere.

Last year was Aupperle’s first Pumpkin Festival since moving to Laconia, and she’s eager to step on the gas of its resurgence.

“To see it be something coming back to life excites me. It excites me because I work in a ‘think bigger’ mentality,” Aupperle said. “My excitement and desire to get involved is to help be a conduit of bigger growth faster. So we're not only relying on the chamber to make these things happen downtown.”

Toward that end, Aupperle hopes to bring in more volunteers and to spearhead robust outreach to her neighbors downtown and other interested local businesses. 

“The Chaos and Kindness brand has an extensive volunteer pool” that they hope to tap into, especially if it means bringing the pumpkin tower back, she noted. 

In addition, though, growing the festival means getting broad swaths of community members back into the motions of community engagement after years of canceled events. 

“My objective ... [is to] ​re-energize people even here locally who have forgotten how to get out and get involved in the community and how to make a difference,” Aupperle said.