Lansing to hold ‘Family Game Night’ community celebration

The Lansing Community Celebration is making a return to the town’s center stage Sept. 5-7. The theme for this year’s festivities and parade is “Family Game Night.” 

The event, which livens the town for an entire weekend, is in its sixth year, and organizers with the Lansing Events Committee said they have found their groove for planning what amounts to a labor of love dedicated to Lansing’s tight-knit community. The group, comprising about 11 town residents, has been planning these celebrations since 2018, the year of Lansing’s bicentennial.

“Everybody in the group goes through and really understands their assignments,” said Valerie McMillen, an organizer with the committee and a longtime Lansing resident. “It all comes together in the end.”

This year’s celebration will feature the expected carnival rides, plenty of fair foods, fireworks show, skilled carnival artists making balloon animals come to life and music curated by local DJs.

McMillen said that there will also be activities that tie into this year’s theme of “Family Game Night.”

“We got approved to have our bingo license, so we’re going to have some games of bingo, and I think we’re going to try to do it Thursday, Friday and Saturday,” McMillen said. “It’s like rapid-fire bingo. We’re going to try it here and see if we can pull it off. We’re really excited about that.”

The theme will also inspire the parade’s floats. 

“There’s a $500 prize for the winner with the best float,” McMillen said. “They can use it however they want. Floats will have to follow the theme, and our team of judges will decide the winner. This is a great thing for us to bring to the community.”

Last year, following the “Candyland” theme, a team of junior and senior Lansing High School students won the prize.

“They’re all girls that go to Lansing High, and they had the best float,” McMillen said.

The judges are typically volunteers from around the community. For instance, members of Lansing town government sometimes volunteer their time to rate floats. This, McMillen said, truly highlights the togetherness of the community, something she noticed shortly after moving to Lansing. McMillen and her family have lived in Lansing since 1976. 

“Everybody knows everybody,” she said. “Everybody is either a cousin or an uncle, or just family. There is just a lot of support here for one another.”

That support is always present in moments of great need, McMillen added.

“If there is a fire, sickness — anything — the community is there,” she said. “To give this community a celebration, we try to get as many free things as we can so it doesn’t cost people an arm and a leg. [Organizers] pay for a lot of things ourselves. So, our celebration is to give back to the community for everything that they do for everyone here.”

It’s not just McMillen who noticed Lansing’s close-knit community early on in her life in the town. She has also seen students in their teenage years comment on the sense of community they feel. McMillen is a part-time worker at Lansing Middle School’s cafeteria.

“Even people that move here know it,” McMillen said. “I get to meet a lot of the new students who come into the middle school, and they are always truly shocked at how close everybody is and how well everybody knows everybody. You kind of get into that even as a new person here. I really like that — and it is also how I feel about the town.”

Lansing at Large appears every week in Tompkins Weekly. Send story ideas to editorial@vizellamedia.com. Contact Eddie Velazquez at edvel37@gmail.com or on X (formerly Twitter) @ezvelazquez.

In brief:

The Lansing Community Library will host a cozy conversation with multitalented visual artist Annie Sheng on Aug. 14 from 7-8 p.m. Sheng’s art is renowned for her bold acrylic, gouache and sumi ink paintings that often delve into speculative and narrative themes. Her exhibition, “Creatures and Food Cultures,” will be on display in the library’s community room until the end of August. 

Sheng’s work can also be found here: https://annieshengart.wordpress.com/.