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Springtime bluebonnets in Brenham, Texas (Scarborough photo)

It must be the budding trees or flowering bulbs that make people giddy, but springtime is the time for strange celebrations and goofy festivals. 

Communities get weird as early as February, trying to throw off winter's shackles by looking for groundhog Punxsutawny Phil in Pennsylvania, running around flipping pancakes in Liberal, Kansas and of course tossing plastic beads and whooping it up for Mardi Gras (and not just in New Orleans -- the first known US Mardi Gras celebration was in Mobile, Alabama, and they're still at it. There's also one in Galveston, Texas.)  By the time everyone gets through Lent, I guess they're ready to celebrate the arrival of spring in the most imaginative ways.

The good news is that these oddball events are usually pretty family-friendly, and there are plenty of them around if you read your local paper and keep an ear out on the radio.  Here in the Central Texas and Austin area, for example, we have an ode to potted pork and a party for a downbeat donkey.

Yes, Austin's world-famous SPAMARAMA was particularly exciting in 2007, the Year of  the Pig.  You've got your SPAM Jam music (featuring artists like the Mother Truckers and Uranium Savages,) your SPAMalympics and of course the SPAM Cook-off.  This high-class festival has been running since 1978, to prove that mere BBQ cookoffs and the like are no real challenge -- cook up some SPAM that people will actually eat, and you have an achievement!   My favorite creation is SPAMALAMA Ding Dongs.  Do not ask.

Too gross for ya?  Want something "normal?"

Costumes! Maypoles! Eeyore!  We're talking Eeyore's Birthday Party, held annually in Austin since 1963.  This is long-term goofiness to honor poor bummed-out Eeyore (of Winnie the Pooh fame) who just seemed to really need a party a few decades back, so a couple of students and a professor held an appropriate celebration, and the rest is springtime history.  Now they're even talking about a statue to commemorate the event in the park where it all started.

So, look around and see what strange things are happening in your neck of the woods.  Belly Flop and Melon-Chunkin' Contests?  C'mon, tell us about them!

Or just go look at the pretty flowers and welcome spring a little more quietly....

Technorati tags:  travel, family travel, festivals