The parish festival of Holy Family, Fond du Lac, will be expanded to two days and held in August this year to help celebrate the community’s 25th anniversary. (Submitted photo)

The largest Catholic parish in southeastern Wisconsin will relocate its festival this year to the county fairgrounds, double its length and shift its dates from October to August.

Holy Family, Fond du Lac, will hold its 25th Anniversary Festival on Aug.16-17 at the Fond du Lac County Fairgrounds, according to Director of Parish Events Eva Thelen-Dunphy.

The event will happen as part of the multi-site parish’s 25th anniversary celebration.

When six parishes combined to form Holy Family — which now includes nearly 5,600 households — a larger event initially used the fairgrounds. The event eventually shifted to the Holy Family church site where a large courtyard and other facilities are available.

Another change included making it a one-day fall festival beginning in 2021.

“We’ve been running a big Oktoberfest celebration here, hayrides, a bilingual English and German Mass that we did before the festival kicked off, and then everybody came out into the courtyard, and we just had a big party celebration with a local, authentic German band.”

With the parish marking its 25th year, Thelen-Dunphy and her colleagues considered ways to make the 2025 edition more special.

“We kind of remembered our heritage of using the Recreation Center at the Fairgrounds. It’s a bigger space,” she said about the 20,000-square foot facility. “This event is slightly outgrowing the space that we have here, so it kind of was a logical step to reach out to the city and see what we could do.”

She also said that the parish felt a big weekend event was in order as part of ongoing recognition of the 25th anniversary year.

That big weekend means a lot more entertainment and culture on stage than the traditional German band.

“We also are tying this event into another event that we have been hosting for the last few years, our Latin-flavored event,” she said. “All of the Hispanic heritages that make up Holy Family have thrown an independent event where each one of their heritages is offered, so we’d have food from Guatemala and Mexico, and we’d have dancers from Honduras.”

At the festival this year, chiles rellenos and tamales could find a home side-by-side with the bratwurst and other German foods from the October event, and a bilingual Mass is planned with English and Spanish.

Not every I is dotted and T is crossed yet on the festival’s details, but she believes all the elements taken as a whole will encourage the most people to not just come to the festival but try out their parish on another Sunday.

“There’s a lot of moving parts, as you can imagine,” Thelen-Dunphy said, “but that’s the goal. That’s the hope.”