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The big parade starts at noon, starting at Third and Wisconsin downtown and followed by music, dancing and pipes and drums at the Irish Cultural and Heritage Center.
This free festival at the Hjemkomst Center includes two entertainment stages, heritage programs, arts and crafts, interactive booths and Celtic food and treats.
The parade is at 1:30 p.m. and runs from Capitol Square.
In Chicago, they really do dye the river green. Watch the dye job at 10:45 p.m. from the Michigan Avenue or Columbus Drive bridges, then watch the noon parade through Grant Park. Navy Pier also is celebrating with Irish and Celtic music.
In this traditionally Irish city, the noon parade runs along Fourth Street to Rice Park.
In Kansas City, Mo., the 37th edition of the St. Pat's parade will wind through the historic Westport district at 11 a.m., with Shamrocks & Shenanigans music and contests later in the Power & Light District.
This Mississippi town, across from Clinton, Iowa, celebrates its heritage with Dutch dancing, windmill tours, street scrubbing and a 3 p.m. Saturday parade.
This Dutch heritage fest in central Iowa draws more than 100,000 tourists. For more, see Tulip Time in Pella.
This festival in Allen Park downtown features fur-trade and logging-era encampments with tepees, a saloon and games.
More than 100,000 people come to this fiesta on the West Side (just south of downtown), which features a 10 a.m. Saturday arade, low-rider car show and lots of food, music and dancing.
This big festival on the lakefront features lots of rollicking, zydeco-laced polka and hearty food. Just down the shoreline at the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Lakefront Festival of Arts brings in many of the region's best artists. For more, see Polish for a day.
This family festival at Norskedalen Nature & Heritage Center, in the coulees near La Crosse, features the best of Scandinavian culture: food, music and crafts. For children, there will be a visit from the trolls by the bridge, fjord horses and a scavenger hunt.
Meet Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley, Mark Twain and other turn-of-the-century celebrities and see live theater, a medicine show and Buffalo Bill's Wild West & Congress of Rough Riders of the World at Midway Village Museum.
This Fox River town on the western edge of Chicago offers music, crafts, carnival, Green Expo and a big parade at 1 p.m. Sunday.
This festival honors the fictional heroes of Vilhelm Moberg's "Emigrants'' novels. There's a Snuff Box treasure hunt, Friday fireworks and 6 p.m. Saturday parade.
Look for minstrels, beignets, French lessons and a 43-foot replica of the Eiffel Tower in Cathedral Square Park.
The outdoor pageant in this eastern South Dakota town, the setting for most of the "Little House'' books, is based on "The Long Winter'' this year.
The festival in this western Minnesota town revolves around the book "On the Banks of Plum Creek.''
This Dakota powwow near Red Wing is a competition, so expect lots of flashy dancing. Grand entries are at 1 and 7 p.m.
This is the big event of the year at Fort William, North America's largest fur post. There's a powwow, military reenactments, a Celtic festival and Summer Games Challenge.
This big festival on the shores of Lake Michigan celebrates all things Italian.
"Das Fest Mit Fun'' features German music, food and beer at the Brown County Fair Grounds in this Minnesota River Valley town. The big parade is Sunday.
This town on the Rock River, south of Rockford, celebrates its heritage with a Native American encampment and cowboy and frontier acts, including a medicine show, gun-spinning and rope-cracking. There are covered-wagon rides and and a canoe rally and 8K run on Sunday. Rent a tepee or covered wagon to stay in. Proceeds go to restore Oregon's 48-foot statue of Chief Black Hawk, made in 1911.
This festival just north of Milwaukee features music and food plus goofy contests: outhouse-racing, wife-carrying, sauerkraut-eating and a German spelling bee.
Ole and Lena host this friendly, authentic, very fun and very large festival of Scandinavian culture. The parade, one of the region's best, is at 10:30 a.m.
Look for dachshunds, dirndls and lots of oompah music at this big party at Henry Maier Festival Park on Lake Michigan.
You can't see this kind of thing just anywhere: cut-throat log rolling, boom running, springboard chopping and speed climbing.
Re-enactors will occupy the banks of the Yellow River at this re-created North West Co. fur post.
A fleet of international sailing vessels will arrive on the only Lake Superior port of call on the Great Lakes United Tall Ships Challenge 2010. There will be a pirate school for kids, tours Friday-Sunday and day sails Friday-Monday; reserve early.
This Manitoba prairie town celebrates its heritage with pavilions representing 44 nationalities, offering music, dance and food at many venues.
This southern Minnesota hamlet near Pine Island puts on an Old World festival, with Swiss guests to yodel and demonstrate such crafts as Scherenschnitte, or scissor cutting.
Re-enactors from across the continent gather at Grand Portage National Monument for the annual fur-trade rendezvous; next door, the Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Chippewa holds a powwow. Reserve lodgings far in advance.
This big heritage fest on the banks of the Mississippi includes an Irish Fair Idol contest, tugs of war, sheep-herding demonstrations, ceili classes, children's games and lots of music.
A fleet of international sailing vessels arrives at the only Wisconsin port of call on the Great Lakes United Tall Ships Challenge 2010. Tickets go on sale May 10 for tours and day sails; reserve early.
It's the 81st year for this big parade on the South Side, which draws 75,000 participants and 1.5 million spectators.
Another big heritage festival at the Henry Maier festival park on Lake Michigan.
Revel in the past during this show of antique machinery, which includes rides on trains and a carousel, square dancing, roving musicians and nightly jamborees.
This Swiss town near Madison has been putting on an outdoor William Tell pageant, with one performance in German, since 1938. A children's lantern parade is on Friday, and festivities include yodeling, an arts show and ethnic fashions.
On the Minneapolis riverfront, across from downtown, enter a Hammerschlagen, wiener-eating or barrel-rolling tournament and take polka lessons. For dogs, there's a Dachshund Dash.
The festival in this western suburb of Minneapolis is best known for its dachshund races, in which more than 100 dogs compete in the hurdles, sprints and sofa jump, followed by a costume contest and smart pet tricks. They're at 1 p.m. Saturday at Wayzata West Middle School. There's also an arts and crafts fair, kids' carnival and parade at 1 p.m. Sunday on Lake Street.
It's in Henry Maier Festival Park and features a powwow, fireworks, lacrosse tournament, fine arts and tribal village.
The Victorian estate on the Mississippi River hosts horses, restored carriages and drivers in period dress for competitive arena and cross-country sport driving, a passion of the frontier aristocrats who built it.
The famous author was born in the bluffs above this Mississippi River town, which celebrates with guided bus tours to the birth site, kids' pioneer games, traditional music and crafts and a Pepin Laura contest that tests knowledge of the "Little House'' books.
Meet the Narren, enter a sauerkraut-eating contest, listen to polka and zydeco and watch the daily parade.
The harvest festival in this Czech town an hour south of the Twin Cities features music, dancing and Czech beer and treats. The Parade of Farm Pride is at noon.
A three-part re-enactment in town and in the countryside shows what happened in a small western Minneota town after Northfield chased off the Jesse James gang. There's also music, dancing and a gunslinger show.
No one's more fun than a voyageur, and they'll be dancing, boasting and trying to best one another at this family-friendly event an hour north of the Twin Cities.
In the old lead-mining district in southwest Wisconsin, play shove ha'penny in the Kiddleywink Pub, eat figgyhobbin and pasties, listen to tommyknocker tales and tour Cornish miners' cottages.
This big festival includes nine days of non-stop partying. There's food, music and carnival rides, plus the Maple Leaf Parade, the Laff Olympics, Craft Beer and Heritage Night and the Torchlight Parade.
There will be music, dancing, children's games and lock and dam tours in this antebellum town on the Mississippi River.
This Mennonite community just southwest of Iowa City, famous for its quilts, will offer pony rides, a pumpkin-carving contest, demonstrations of Old World artisanry, music and homemade potato chips, apple fritters, ice cream and chicken, biscuits and gravy.
This festival at the Wade House historic site near Sheboygan includes the biggest and best battle re-enactments in the Upper Midwest, held at 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. each day. There's also a traveling medicine show, court martials, a sutler's row, period concerts and appearances by Abraham Lincoln.
This southern Minnesota festival is great for families, with more than 1,200 re-enactors dancing, demonstrating, competing and pulling visitors back into the fur-trade era.
The Lions Club puts on this riverfront festival, which includes wiener-dog races, polka lessons, hammerschlagen, pumpkin-decorating and a beanbag tournament.
At Historic Forestville, a living-history site frozen in 1899, visitors will see horse-drawn corn harvesting, watch a quilting bee and help make an apple pie.
This pioneer farmstead in the coulees southeast of La Crosse is wonderfully atmospheric, and the crackerjack re-enactors of the Second Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry's Company B give the region's most affecting portrayal of war. Battles are at 1 p.m. both days.
It's the Iowa Barn Foundation's annual free, self-guided tour of restored historic barns.
There will be carriage rides and pumpkin decorating in addition to food and music in this northern suburb of Chicago.
This event, which commemorates the 1975 sinking of the ore freighter with 29 men, is the only time the public can see the interior of the light tower when the beacon is lighted.
