The Water Lantern Festival: Warm Glow on the Night Lake

We attended the Water Lantern Festival in Fresno, set in Woodward Park. This event is held annually in different cities, so be sure to check a schedule to see if and when it comes to yours.

Things to Know

The idea of the festival is to decorate lanterns to honor the dead and float them over the lake. We bought tickets ahead of time for about $31. This price includes the lantern kit, LED candle, marker, and playing cards, plus a light up flower crown($5). The lantern kits come with different colored markers, but only one per kit. Last year we resolved this problem by sharing with a group of other people with different colors. The festival organizers were also selling blankets for people to lay on. You can attend the festival without a ticket, you just can’t participate in the lantern decoration and launch. You’ll need to pay for parking, too. Fortunately its very inexpensive. You can do this either at a kiosk or thru an app. There’ll be signs in the lot explaining how. If you sign up for the festival one year, they’ll put you on a mailing list to let you know the next time it comes around to your city. This is what happened to us. Just a heads up, because there are no lights aside from the lanterns, it can get pretty dark before they’re all released. Lucky for me, I had the flower crown, and my festival companion had a colored-light up necklace, which made it much easier to find each other.

The Festival

There are vender booths, just not many and its hit or miss if you’ll find something. Last year I found a pair of earrings, this year there were some pretty and cute pieces, just nothing that jumped out at me. If the opening time makes you nervous about missing dinner, don’t worry; they have a good amount of food trucks. Though the lines for them can get a little crazy. At the one I went to, right before I reached the order window they announced they’d run out of everything, except the thing I wanted(hooray!). To be fair, it was a little later in the evening.

The stars of the festival are quite fittingly the lanterns, which for the price you pay are fairly good quality. Some lantern decorations are silly and goofy, others have more beautifully done designs, and some are doodles. The festival starts at 5 p.m., but the lantern launch doesn’t happen until it gets darker around 7. We hung out, played games, ate delicious food, decorated our lanterns, and then finally it was time for the launch.

The Launch

The current was coming toward us, so our lanterns needed some extra help flowing out. On the plus side, we got a good view of the lights spreading out their glow from the opposite side of the lake. Music was also being played on that side. If we’d been on the same side it was coming from it would’ve been disturbingly loud, but over where we were, it was nice and atmospheric. The lights from the lanterns reflected perfectly in the black mirror of the night lake. Watching the warm brightness of the yellow-orange move smoothly over the contrastingly cool and dark waters was hypnotizing. As we stood near the lake, the lanterns’ glow shifted and grew and gathered, spreading out and bunching together as they made their crossing. A rope barrier was set up on a further side of the lake to make sure the lanterns did not float away entirely. As the night grew old a row of captured lanterns could be seen making a line at the barrier. Though the festival technically ended at 9, they let everyone have an extra 10 minutes.