Blinded by the light?

One week before Christmas, Catskill town planners approved the proposed Hello Panda Lantern Festival at the former Friar Tuck Inn on Route 32 in Kiskatom. Organizers, on their website, boasted that the festival is considered the largest of its kind in North America.

The Catskill festival was scheduled to run through March 29, but this week the bottom fell out. With five weeks left in the festival’s run, this message appeared on the organizer’s website: “Due to weather conditions and safety reasons, Catskill Lantern Festival will be terminated. Unscanned tickets will be refunded, please wait for further notice.”

Thus, the festival, which entered shrouded in mystery, suddenly closed for reasons shrouded in mystery.

We wonder what “weather conditions” the organizers are talking about. It has been a relatively mild, storm-free winter so far, and people who attended the festival, especially the children, at least from what we’ve seen on social media, seem to be having fun. And the lantern exhibits look bright and colorful.

So, where did things go so wrong so quickly? After all, “terminated” is a strong word.

Our guess is it has a lot to do with the “safety reasons” part of the message.

Festival operators appeared in court Feb. 13 to answer to a pair of code violations: the State Property Maintenance Code, which regulates such standards as occupancy limitations, mechanical and electrical requirements and fire safety requirements, and for having deficient electrical wiring and equipment, according to the Catskill Town Court office.

The first item to note is that the organizers are refunding ticket holders, and that is something they need to keep doing. The second is that the Greene County Planning Board recommended denial of a permit to hold the festival, but since the board has no regulatory power, it can only advise. Third, the Lantern Festival was something Catskill had never seen before, and it was apparently fun while it lasted.

For about three months, the festival was a success. Today, it is unclear if the organizers wished us any malice or whether the pleasures they wanted to give us were limited. But then, the sight of so many lanterns may have dazzled us.