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The 1995 African Film Festival at Columbia College was directed by Alice Stephens and premiered in April of that year. The film festival was titled "Visions of Africa" and featured 16 films. One of the films entitled “Black Girl” is a French-speaking film that follows a young nanny in a French household as she experiences harsh treatment through service. The film festival was a revolutionary collection that introduced African films to the United States population; only curated picks from the genre had been available to the public prior to the festival and many of the films shown had never been available on video or home entertainment.

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Valleyfair Family Amusement Park opened in 1976 in Shakopee, Minnesota. In 1978, Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio, acquired Valleyfair, which allowed for accelerated park expansion. Currently, it is the largest amusement park in the upper Midwest with over 75 rides on 90 acres, including a Soak City Water Park and Planet Snoopy. Valleyfair also hosts corporate events like Family Fun Days for local companies. Events like these let employees bring their families to the park as guests of their employer. Sperry-UNIVAC was a computer division created when Remington Rand merged with the Sperry Corporation in 1955. For three decades, computer-related companies and their spinoffs boosted the Minnesota economy. Sperry dropped the UNIVAC name in 1984.

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Since 2004, Uncle Jon’s Music has been an award winning, family owned and operated, musical instrument store and service center in Westmont, Illinois. They host an annual customer appreciation party each year with live music, kids activities, raffles, and free hot dogs.

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The 20^th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots were celebrated with a rally in Central Park in 1989 where notable gay activists like Harvey Fierstein​, Harry Hay, and poet Allen Ginsberg spoke. The Stonewall Riots mark the beginning of the modern LGBTQ rights movement. The three day riots began on June 28, 1969 after a police raid at the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar, in Greenwich Village in Manhattan, New York.

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The annual Tuckahoe Steam & Gas Show is an antique agricultural equipment show organized by the Tuckahoe Steam & Gas Association in Maryland. The annual show is a family-oriented event that is also a major fundraising event for the organization. Founded in 1973, the association aims to preserve Maryland's Eastern Shore rural heritage and to educate future generations. The nonprofit all volunteer organization collects and restores old equipment to display and demonstrate during shows and events. Its collections include a variety of historic engines, farm machinery and tools.

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Westfield is a town in Western Massachusetts with a population of about 41,000. It was originally settled by the Pocomtuc tribe, and there is little known about them except that they led similar lifestyles to neighboring New England tribes. In 1640, they were uprooted by European settlers from the Connecticut Colony. The region was slowly acquired by the new tenants, who purchased the land off of Native Americans. Westfield, as the town was later called, was officially incorporated in 1660 and represented the westernmost settlement in Massachusetts Colony until 1725.

For more than a century after its founding, Westfield served as an agricultural hub in the Colony due to its rich alluvial lands. The town was later a manufacturing center for bricks, cigars, and whips—the last of which gave Westfield the nickname of “Whip City.” By the late eighteenth century, Westfield was firmly an industrial town and churned out bicycles, paper and woods products, and textile machinery. Though Westfield is no longer an industrial mecca, it continues to support large businesses by serving as an ideal place for warehouse storage.

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The Saint Paul Winter Carnival in Minnesota has been a family tradition since 1886 is the oldest winter festival in the United States. The carnival started when newspaper articles circulated stating that Minnesota was akin to Siberia in the winter. The people of the area retaliated by creating a winter festival that would highlight the beauty of Minnesota winters. Oftentimes, there will be a central theme for the year, and in 1993, the theme was "Treasure the Tradition," encouraging everyone to not only treasure the tradition of the carnival, but also the traditions they have with their friends and family.

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Celebrating a birthday with cake and lit candles is a practice that has evolved over hundreds of years drawing from many cultures. In Ancient Greece, there was a tradition of making moon-shaped cakes to bring to the temple of Artemis, goddess of the moon. The cakes had lit candles decorating them, meant to make them shine like the moon. In Roman times, cakes were made to celebrate some citizens’ 50th birthdays, although this was reserved for men of high social status. By the 18th century, Germans had a tradition of celebrating birthdays for children called “Kinderfeste,” in which a cake would be topped with candles in the morning and kept lit all day until the cake was eaten after dinner. It was not until the industrial revolution, however, that birthday cakes became a trend in the United States when ingredients, baking tools, and even pre-made cakes cost less and were more accessible to the population.

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Tip Up Town USA is an annual winter ice fishing festival held in Houghton Lake, Michigan that takes place during the last two weekends of January. The festival includes a number of activities in addition to ice fishing. There are snowmobile races, ice sculpture contents, as well as a number of family-oriented activities, including a carnival and pony rides.

The festival gets its name from a device used in ice fishing call a “tip up.” The device is attached to a fishing pole, and when a fish is attached, the flag attached to the device “tips up” to let the person fishing know that there is something on their line.

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The Albany Timber Carnival was held almost every July in Albany, Oregon to celebrate Independence Day and to commemorate the region’s timber industry. The carnival began in 1941 and was comprised of four main activities: logging sports competition, royal court, parade, and fireworks display. The carnival lasted until 2000, when Albany’s changing economy no longer depended on timber as much.