If you want to find out what an authentic Oktoberfest celebration is really like, you have two options.
The first is drop whatever you are doing and make immediate plane reservations for Frankfurt, Germany. Then buy a train ticket for a little town called Bad Kreusnacht. The train is a local, or Bummelzug, so it stops at every village along the way to pick up other passengers headed for Oktoberfest.
You won’t have to ask directions to Oktoberfest when you get there, either. Just follow the crowd. Nobody is going anywhere else.
At the celebration you will find competing oompah bands blaring away at full volume. Some will be marching around outside while others will be ensconced in a corner of one of the Oktoberfest beer halls.
The main beer hall at Bad Kreusnacht will have two bands. The plan is for one to play for awhile, then the other takes over so the first can freshen their beer steins. After several such freshenings, however, both will wind up playing at the same time. Usually, waltz versus polka.
The beer hall is filled with extra-long picnic tables. This is where you sit and bang your beer stein on the table in time with the music. It is also where at some point in the evening, one or more of the rotund little serving girls will stand and lead the table in song.
Sometime before dawn folks will migrate back to the train station for the ride home. A word of caution here: there will be several trains going to several different destinations. It’s easy to get on the wrong train and wind up on the wrong side of Germany. I know, it happened to me.
If all of this is a bit too much, consider your second option. It has two parts, and both happen Oct. 1 at St. Alphonsus Catholic Church on Oak Street.
Part Number One: PumkinFest starts at 11 a.m. and runs until 2 p.m. PumpkinFest is for the whole family, but mostly for the kids who get to adopt a pumpkin, decorate it, put it on display, get their faces painted with all kinds of weird colors, and then go for a hayride as they chow down on a variety of yummy stuff.
Part Number Two: OktoberFest starts at 6:30 p.m. for the grown-ups. Same picnic tables, beer, German food and polka-blaring oompah band you would find in Germany. And while no one will stand on your table to lead you in song, after you freshen your stein a few times, you can enter the yodeling contest.
That’s something they don’t even have in Germany.
