Somerville’s annual Fluff Festival is this Saturday
The sweetest day of the year returns to Somerville this Saturday.
On September 26 from 3 to 7 p.m., Union Square will transform into a sugary, sticky haven for lovers of Marshmallow Fluff with the 2015 Fluff Festival. The festival is an annual tradition put on by Union Square Main Streets to celebrate one of Somerville’s proudest inventions.
“They really wanted to focus on what still makes Union Square special—innovation and creativity and new sort of local inventions,’’ Esther Hanig, the director of Union Square Main Streets, said of the first festival in 2006.
And so Fluff Festival has continued for the past decade, paying homage to Somerville’s own Achibald Query, the man who mastered the recipe for Fluff in 1917. He went door to door in Somerville selling the product himself until sugar shortages in World War I shut down his production. He sold the recipe to a candy company, which later boosted the local favorite to national fame.
In his honor, the day is characterized by music, games, crafts, and all things marshmallow.
This year’s Fluff Festival has three different stages: the main stage, the sideshow stage, and the shenanigans stage. The main stage will host performances from the Flufferettes, a burlesque group, as well as the Afro-Latin-Caribbean group Ten Tumbao, and the funk street band Revolutionary Snake Ensemble. The sideshow stage, which is new to this year’s Fluff Festival, will feature the School of HONK! and the MA Ghostbusters. The last is the shenanigans stage, dedicated to all of the day’s stickiest festivities like Fluff bowling, Fluff jousting, Blind Man’s Fluff, and a Fluff lick off.
“The shenanigans stage has mostly crazy, zany Fluff-related get down and dirty with Fluff games,’’ Hanig said.
Organizers are working to make an app available to festival-goers this year, which will allow users to keep track of event times and locations.
Returning to the Fluff Festival is the cooking contest, with five different award categories: best traditional fluff recipe, best original recipe, most creative presentation, best youth entry, and best overall grand prize. After the awards go out to the winning chefs, all of the creations will be available to festival-goers who haven’t had their fill of Fluff.
Union Square Main Streets has already acquired more than 15 cases of Fluff for the day, which doesn’t include what will be used in the cooking contest or brought by other vendors. Hopefully that’ll be enough Fluff to go around, as the festival is expected to draw more than 10,000 Fluff fanatics celebrating a great American invention in it’s original home.
“Here’s this thing that was created in Union Square and we’re still creating it,’’ Hanig said.
Related gallery: Other ingenious inventions born in New England
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