The Texas Renaissance Festival enchants students

By Max Hess     12/3/24 11:08pm

Nine gnomes, six knights, four wizards and a blacksmith wait patiently for a turkey leg. Your eyes seem to deceive you: Is the scene before you real, or is it a fairy tale-inspired mirage? This is only the beginning of the wild and zany world that is the Texas Renaissance Festival. 

The Texas Renaissance Festival returned for its 50th iteration, which ran from Oct. 12 to Dec. 1. Only an hour and a half from campus, the festival features over 400 shops and 21 stages across its 70 acres. According to the festival’s website, it welcomes over 500,000 travelers annually, many of whom don costumes and camp on-site. 

Despite its size and reputation, the Texas Renaissance Festival was not the first of its kind. According to the Smithsonian Magazine, renaissance fairs were born out of inclusion; they were a safe space for performers when free speech was fragile. As a landmark in the ’60s counterculture, free expression is at the heart of renaissance fairs: the Smithsonian catalogs how in the peak of the Red Scare of the 1960s, a teacher in Los Angeles began a theater program that evolved into the first renaissance fair.

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Even not knowing the history of Renaissance fairs’ emphasis on free expression, it is evident at the Texas Renaissance Fair. People walk around in costumes of all types: video game characters, horror movie villains, humble village folk, knights in full armor and princesses of all kinds. The creativity of these costumes cannot be understated; where else can one find a gnome with a steampunk jetpack margarita dispenser?  Beyond the costumes, attendees can engage in a wide variety of medieval activities.

“It’s kind of a pick-your-own adventure thing,” Judson McGinnes, a Jones College freshman who visited the fair for the first time this year, said. ”You can buy swords, katanas, shields, armor sets, turkey legs; go to museums, joust with your friends, watch medieval comedies and shoot bows and arrows. It seems to go on forever; whenever you think you have seen it all, you wind up in a new space, like a garden or an elephant enclosure.”

Beyond the array of activities to engage in, attendees can also indulge in some of the festival’s food options. One would be hard-pressed to find a food that isn’t on a stick, fried, a 600-calorie dessert or all three, in the case of fried cheesecake on a stick. That being said, vendors get creative within these boundaries, mainly with different varieties of meat options. 

“It’s very engrossing,” Maaz Zuberi, a Jones senior, said. “I was expecting it to be a lot smaller.”

Jacob Lowenstein, who also attended the festival with Zuberi, said he found the experience unique and enjoyable.

“I think it is something that everybody should do,” Lowenstein, a Jones senior, said. “It’s not like any sort of experience you’ll get anywhere else.”

Behind the Texas Renaissance Festival’s gates is a safe haven for the absurd and zany, where all are welcome. To me, an hour and a half drive and $30 is a fair price for an experience this magical.

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