The story
Kitchener-Waterloo Oktoberfest in Kitchener-Waterloo
Festhallen packed with brass bands, communal tables and stein-raising fill Kitchener and Waterloo each October for the largest Oktoberfest celebration outside Germany, launched in 1969 and timed to the Canadian Thanksgiving long weekend. The festival's roots run back to the region's nineteenth-century German settlers, and its Thanksgiving Day Parade through downtown remains the most visible single event of the run.
Kitchener was called Berlin until 1916, when anti-German sentiment during the First World War pushed the city to rename itself after the British field marshal, and that erased name is part of what makes the region's Oktoberfest, launched in 1969, more than an imported theme party.