EASTHAM — Caroline DeBrota and Shawyoun Shaidani’s road to the Turnip Festival began in 2023, when the Medford pair decided to dress up as fish and chips for Halloween.
They took Shaidani’s half of the costume — he was a bag of Cape Cod Potato Chips — as an excuse to visit Nauset Light for a photo shoot. When they arrived in Eastham, they saw signs advertising that year’s Turnip Festival and immediately knew they had to attend.
“I have never in my entire life missed an opportunity to wear a themed outfit,” DeBrota says. “We turned up in our themed outfits, rudimentary though they were, and we were greeted like visiting royalty.”
On Nov. 23, DeBrota and Shaidani came back for the 21st annual rendition of the town’s fall party, this time with more elaborate outfits. Although the Turnip Festival hasn’t crowned a king or queen in recent years, the crowd gathered at Eastham’s Chapel in the Pines erupted in applause at the arrival of the Turnip Mage and Turnip Bard.
DeBrota and Shaidani weren’t the only crafty ones at this year’s festivities. Darius Coombs of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe led festivalgoers in the creation of wampum pendants using a pump drill — a thousand-plus-year-old technology made of string, wood, and stone — to bore holes in seashells. Eleanor Jackson, also a Mashpee Wampanoag, taught visitors how to make dolls from corn husks.
“These were some of the things Wampanoag children would make,” she told the small crowd gathered around her table. “It taught kids important skills: how to braid, how to weave, how to be patient. It also kept us out of our grandparents’ hair.”
The first Turnip Festival, held in 2003, attracted so many people that the Chapel in the Pines overflowed. Organizer Marianne Sinopoli — who is also into costumes: she created Jack Kerig and Julie Allen Hamilton’s past prize-winning turnip costumes — became the organizer of the Turnip Festival in 2013, just in time for the event’s 10th anniversary.
“The first festival was supposed to be a one-time thing,” Sinopoli says. “We never expected it to get so popular.”
Popular enough, in fact, that this year’s contest to guess the weight of a huge turnip provided by local farmer Judy Scanlon ended in a three-way tie. Jane de Groot, Laura McDowell-May, and Ryan Boeding all correctly guessed the tremendous tuber’s weight: 17 pounds, 6 ounces.
That hasn’t ever happened before, Sinopoli says.
The festival, which library staff estimate attracted about 800 people, ended with a performance by the Wampanoag Nation Singers and Dancers that everyone was invited to join in. Sinopoli, DeBrota, and Shaidani linked hands in celebration of Eastham’s favorite local root.
