After being canceled last year, Lindenfest returned to celebrate its 40th anniversary in the village of Lindenhurst over the weekend.
The event was held Aug. 24-27 with a festival on the Lindenhurst Village Hall grounds, and a carnival at the adjacent Slove Park.
The annual event, which was first held in 1983, was canceled in 2022 after it was unable to line up a carnival or enough volunteers to help organize the event.
“You have to book carnivals 12 months in advance at a minimum, and our contract ended when COVID hit,” said Lindenfest President Melissa Forsberg, who joined the organization last year. “We didn’t have Lindenfest in 2020, and then once everything started opening back up, the carnivals that were still out there were completely booked.”
After securing new committee members, as well as a carnival, Lindenhurst’s annual festival was able to return for its 40th year. Lindenfest continued its anniversary celebration through its ’80s and ’90s movie theme.
During the festival’s parade, which was held Saturday, participants like State Bank of the Lakes dressed up in “Jurassic Park” costumes, and local dog car company Camp Bow Wow staff dressed as foxes, while holding several puppies to represent the 1981 film, “The Fox and the Hound.”
While the event is four-days long, the planning process takes around a year and is dependent upon a team of volunteers, according to Forsberg.
“It is a long process, because the carnival and some of the parts to the festival need to be planned well in advance,” Forsberg said, adding that many of the committee members this year were new to the organization.
Because so many members of the Lindenfest committee have recently joined, the committee switched up some of the events, including changing the day of the annual pageant. The pageant was moved to Sunday afternoon, rather than Thursday evening, as it’s traditionally been held throughout the festival’s history.
The change made Miss Lindenhurst 2022 Emily Murray happy. After the event was canceled last year, the 2022 pageant was held on Sept. 2 at Lakes Community High School. Murray was happy to have the opportunity to attend several days of Lindenfest representing the community before the 2023 pageant was held.
“Being back on the stage has given so many more opportunities for me to publicly speak in front of a larger crowd,” Murray said. “It is a really amazing thing to have this community event being back.”
Murray said that she had been coming to Lindenfest since she “was a little kid,” but that attending as a queen was a unique experience.
“Being here as a queen has been a totally amazing experience,” she said. “It’s something that I never thought would be possible. It’s so great that the community can come together and celebrate the work that these board members do all year long. Everyone is having a really amazing time with the food, the carnival games and all of the entertainment.”
Another change for the annual festival was adding in a cutest pet contest. Lindenhurst residents submitted their cats, dogs, fish, snakes and birds for consideration, and voting was open online for more than two weeks to select finalists.
At Lindenfest, buckets were placed out and visitors voted for the cutest pet by donating money into a bucket with a picture of the pet that they wanted to vote for. The pets that brought in the most money throughout the weekend were announced as the winners. According to Forsberg, a majority of the proceeds from the final votes went to Our House of Hope Pet Rescue, a pet rescue organization based in Libertyville.
The festival also ramped up its security at this year’s event. In addition to having the Lindenhurst Police Department, the Lindenfest committee also hired additional security staff and enforced stricter security protocols, like limiting parking on the village property where the event would be held.
“We have more security protocols this year than we ever have before because of circumstances outside of our control,” Forsberg said. “That was a huge thing this year. We just wanted to make sure that everyone was as safe as possible. Because, unfortunately, of the world that we live in now with incidents that have happened at other places, it was just the thing to do.”
It’s not just Lindenfest volunteers that contribute to the success of the festival, though. Lindenhurst Trustee Dawn Suchy said that the village’s public works department works to “maintain the grounds” during the event.
Suchy said that the work the village does is an expense for the village, but added that it’s worth the expense because the festival is an opportunity to bring the community together.
“It is a huge expense for our public works and it is a huge expense for our police, but on the flip side it is a community event,” Suchy said. “People find so many reasons to say, ‘I’m different from you,’ but events like this bring people together. It brings the community together, and I feel like it solidifies that we belong in this community.”
