Unseen and Found, books 2 and 3 in my Folk Trilogy, both take place at least in part in a Colorado mountain town, Animas. In Unseen,  the town is having its annual Fall Festival. When my critique partner read the first chapter, she asked me where on earth I’d gotten the idea for the characters parading through town in outlandish outfits, along with stilt walkers and a hairy monster. I wish I could have told her it was all a product of my writerly imagination, but the first chapter of the book is actually a fairly accurate picture of the Vinotok Festival parade in Crested Butte, Colorado.

Vinotok is an imaginative recreation of a genuine European fertility festival, and Crested Butte puts it on more or less annually. I say “more or less” because some years the festival is more popular with the locals than others. One year a fight over parking led to the cancellation of all but a couple of events. The first time my hubs and I visited Crested Butte, we sort of stumbled on Vinotok by accident, but we’ve managed to visit it deliberately since then. At the end of the festival the town celebrates the “burning of the grump,” a symbolic burning of everybody’s peeves (or something—Crested Butte was always a little vague about what the grump actually meant). I worked both the parade and the grump into Unseen, but I made the latter a lot more sinister than it actually is.

At the moment, Vinotok, like everything else, is on hold until the pandemic eases. But if you’d like to go to Vinotok in the future and want some details, you may have your work cut out for you. Vinotok usually takes place in September, but the locals can be cagey about just when. While they don’t mind you stumbling upon the parade and the “burning of the grump” without meaning to, as we did, they’ve become a little prickly about making it a tourist attraction. Some citizens now refuse to let anyone know when or if the festival happens

If you’d like to see some pictures of the festival, this site has some lovely shots. And having seen two or three Vinotoks, I’m a fan. It struck me as the perfect festival for some members of the Folk to wander into, and I had a great time making that happen.