Celebrate Nashville is an annual event that brings together all the many ethnic and cultural groups that make up this wonderful city that we call Nashville, Tennessee. The event has been around for sixteen years and was originally held in the summer,within a small courtyard of Vanderbilt’s Scarritt - Bennett Center. It was 1995 and our community was growing rapidly and becoming more diversified and our people were in need of ways to understand and appreciate each others differences, that was when the Celebration of Cultures was created. We attended the first year for the purpose of seeing Aashid Himons, a Blues Reggae musician who was always quite popular in the Nashville area. My wife, who was from the country Lebanon, and I left the festival that day with a feeling of something good happening in our city! Little did we know that it would last this long and grow to the huge event that it has become!
Now this gathering of cultures is called Celebrate Nashville and is held annually in October in the beautiful spacious Centennial Park with over 40,ooo people attending, a far cry from the 2,500 of the early years!
Even with this growth the focus of the festival has remained the same, bring together over 50 cultures that live together in Nashville through dance, music, visual arts, a children’s area, an educational Global Village and exotic food to sample. This event is an excellent opportunity for Nashvillians to meet their neighbors and share in their traditions, encouraging dialogue and promoting the cross-cultural awareness and understanding so necessary in our world today.
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