Why I love the Kalorama Chestnut Festival

It’s nearly the 1st Sunday in May, the 1st Sunday in May. I’m sooo excited but that’s when a particular kind of magic reveals itself along the ridgeline.

Life up here can feel spread out, a little scattered between hills and bends and long winding roads. That’s why the Kalorama Chestnut Festival matters so much. It gathers us back in.

Each year, on that first Sunday in May, the mountain shifts. Cars line the tourist highway, (admittedly some ending up in the open drains) and the scouts patiently direct cars around pine trees and granite boulders.

You can feel it before you even see it. The smell arrives first. The sweet, warm and unmistakable smell of chestnuts roasting somewhere just ahead, curling through the cool autumn air. It’s the scent that says the season has turned, and somehow, so have we.

We first came in 2015. Newly minted hills folk, not knowing a soul. I remember standing a little on the edge of it all, watching locals greet each other with easy familiarity. Conversations already in motion. Names called out across the grass. A wave here, a laugh there. It looked effortless, like something you either had or didn’t.

I remember hoping, quietly, that one day I might be part of that. That I might walk into a space like this and feel known.

The festival itself is not grand in the way big events are. It doesn’t need to be. It has been carried by generations of locals and volunteers who show up each year to make it happen. There are stalls and music and food. Handmade things and familiar faces behind trestle tables, laughter that sits close rather than being broadcast.

There are always the small negotiations that come with any good family day out. The inevitable plea for curly potatoes and the hopeful suggestion of a bratwurst sausage. I do the mental tally to decide how many snacks can reasonably be called lunch.

For me, though, there is always one thing I’m looking for.

Babaji’s chestnut curry.

I still remember the first time I tried it. Warm, fragrant, just a little unexpected, and somehow perfectly at home here. It feels like the festival in a bowl. Local, seasonal, generous. Every year I find myself hoping they’ll be there again, scanning the stalls with a kind of optimism that borders on determination.

But what I love most is what happens in between all of that.

You never make it from one end to the other without stopping. Someone calls your name. Someone you haven’t seen since kinder, or last festival season, or since the June 2021 storms. Conversations pick up midstream, as if no time has passed at all.

Somewhere along the way, without quite noticing when it changed, you realise something. You are no longer standing on the edge.

You are the one waving and the one calling out. The one stopping mid-walk because you’ve spotted someone you know. The quiet hope you carried that first year has, over time, settled into something real.

It is one of the only events that stretches across the ridgeline like this. There’s a long way before we gather again for things like Halloween on the Green, and I find myself holding onto this one a little tighter because of it. It fills a space that would otherwise feel too quiet.

Everywhere you look, community groups are there, not just present but active. Lending a hand, cooking, guiding, setting up, packing down. It is a festival built not for the community, but by it. You can feel that in the way people move through the day. There is a shared ownership, a sense that this belongs to all of us.

Then there’s the music. Local, heartfelt, sometimes a little rough around the edges in the best possible way. It drifts across the reserve, weaving through the trees, catching you off guard as you stand there with warm hands and something delicious in hand.

By the time the afternoon light softens, there’s that familiar feeling of fullness that has nothing to do with food. You’ve seen people and connected. You’ve remembered something important about living here.

That this place is not just beautiful, but something you grow into.

This Sunday, May 3rd, it all happens again and I hope to see as many of you there as possible.