Emmaus's Fall Calendar Runs on Two Saturdays, Exactly Four Weeks Apart

Farewell to Summer wrapped up in Triangle Park yesterday. If you were there, you already know it spilled into the Wells Fargo lot for the first time this year, added a second stage of kid activity, and kept the food trucks running until mid-afternoon. If you weren't, the next big Main Street Saturday is already on the books: the Emmaus Halloween Parade, October 17.

Count the days between those two dates and you get exactly 28. Four weeks, Saturday to Saturday. That's not a coincidence of scheduling so much as it's how this borough has always run its fall, two anchor events a month apart with the Farmers Market's weekly Sunday hours filling in everything between them. If you think of autumn here as one slow build toward Halloween, you're missing that the calendar actually front-loads its two biggest gatherings into a single month, then leans on Triangle Park's regular market crowd to keep downtown busy through the rest of November.

What Actually Changed on Main Street This Year

Farewell to Summer has run for years as an Emmaus Main Street Partners event, but the 2026 version grew its footprint. Organizers expanded into the borough-owned Wells Fargo parking lot for the first time, which gave the festival room for a Touch-a-Truck experience with the Emmaus Fire and Police Departments and a free tie-dye station sponsored by Active Learning Centers. Neither of those fit in Triangle Park in past years.

The rest of the day held steady with what regulars expect. Alchemize Pilates led a free outdoor mat class in Triangle Park from 11 to 11:30 a.m. A character meet-and-greet with Moana and Spider-Man drew a crowd to the park at noon. The Emmaus Theatre ran a free screening of The Goonies, sponsored by Edward Jones agent Jeff McElhaney, Ambler Savings Bank, and First Commonwealth Federal Credit Union. Over at Yergey Brewing, Yerg-Fest ran noon to 11 p.m., with Island Time playing in the afternoon and Dishonest Fiddlers closing out the night. The Emmaus Historical Society kept its museum open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. for anyone who wandered a few blocks off Main Street.

Hayden Rinde, manager of Emmaus Main Street Partners, put it simply: the festival "shines a spotlight on local businesses, and creates lasting memories in the heart of the Emmaus Borough." That spotlight is the actual point. Every sponsor listed for this year, from Kent Electrical Supply to Burkholder's Heating & Air Conditioning to New Tripoli Bank, is a business you can walk to.

The Trail That Makes You Actually Walk the Six Blocks

The piece of Farewell to Summer that outlasts the day itself is the Scarecrow Trail. Sponsored this year by United Federal Credit Union, it's built as a passport scavenger hunt through downtown storefronts, each one decorated for fall with a scarecrow somewhere in the display. Participants collect one of ten puzzle pieces at each stop, and a completed passport goes into a raffle for $50 in local gift cards. Passports went live for download on September 11, a week before the festival, which meant some households were already working the trail before the Saturday event even started.

In past years the trail has run through more than 20 participating businesses, which is a meaningful share of Main Street's storefronts for a single afternoon. It's a low-key way the festival does something a one-day event usually can't: it gets people inside businesses they might otherwise walk past.

The Sunday That Never Actually Stops

Here's the part of the calendar most people miss. The Emmaus Farmers' Market runs at Triangle Park every Sunday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., May through November, and it doesn't pause for either festival. It ran the Sunday before Farewell to Summer, it'll run every Sunday between now and the parade, and it'll run the Sunday right after the parade too, on October 18. The market is now in its 26th season with more than 30 producers selling produce, pastured meats, raw honey, and baked goods, and it's the connective tissue that keeps Triangle Park active every single week this fall, not just on the two Saturdays everyone circles on the calendar.

Here's how the next two months actually lay out:

Nothing in that stretch leaves Triangle Park quiet for more than six days at a time.

The Parade Route, Turn by Turn

The Halloween Parade itself follows a set route through the borough's grid, and knowing it in advance saves you from guessing where to park or which side street to avoid. According to the parade's own route information, it runs like this:

1. Starts at the intersection of Keystone and Ridge Streets
2. Heads west on Ridge Street to 6th Street
3. Turns onto Walnut Street and continues west to 9th Street
4. Turns south on 9th Street to Chestnut Street
5. Turns east on Chestnut Street to Main Street
6. Finishes by turning back onto Keystone Avenue

Two fixed points are worth knowing if you're walking the route rather than watching from a porch. The Xfinity Food Truck Court sets up in the Emmaus Borough parking lot on Main Street between 3rd and 4th Streets. And St. Margaret's Church, at Keystone and Elm Streets, sells refreshments the night of the parade to benefit Groceries Plus Food Bank at Bethel Bible Church, a detail that's easy to miss if you've never parked near the church end of the route.

A Tradition Older Than Most of the Buildings Along It

Borough council records reference a Halloween parade as early as October 1919, when Burgess Knauss told council he hadn't yet organized one but would appoint a committee if members wanted it. By October 1921, the American Legion had a committee in place and was reporting back to council on the plan. Whatever form those early parades took, the borough has kept some version of the tradition running for more than a century, which is longer than almost any other single event on the Lehigh Valley's fall calendar.

That history is part of why the borough's own materials describe it as the best Halloween parade in the region, and why the route still threads through the same handful of residential streets, Ridge, Walnut, 9th, Chestnut, Keystone, that have carried it for generations.

The Six Weeks in Between Are the Point

If you live here, the useful takeaway isn't that Emmaus has two festivals. It's that the two festivals are exactly four weeks apart, and the market schedule in between means Triangle Park is doing something almost every Sunday from now through the end of November. You don't need to wait for the next big Saturday to have a reason to walk downtown.

If you're weighing what a Main Street address here is actually worth, whether you're thinking about your own place or helping a family member figure out their next move, Jeff Adams has spent enough time in Emmaus to talk through it plainly. Reach out anytime you want a straight answer on where your home stands in this market.