Butter & Egg Days Parade and Festival

On parade morning the entries start lining up more than three hours before the noon start. In 2026 the waiting line ran along Fourth Street from D Street to I Street, just over half a mile of classic cars, farm trucks, tractors, marching bands and people in chicken suits. Volunteer Doug Faxon worked the line, putting entries in order. “It’s not too hot, it’s not too cold, and it’s definitely not raining,” he said. “If the most stressful part of an event like this is just making sure all the floats and cars end up in the correct order, then that’s a pretty great day.”

The Butter & Egg Days Parade and Festival is held on a Saturday in April in historic downtown Petaluma. The Petaluma Downtown Association runs it. The festival goes from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on the streets around Western Avenue, Kentucky Street and South Petaluma Boulevard, and the parade starts at noon. Visit Petaluma puts the crowd at thirty to thirty-five thousand. The Downtown Association asks visitors to leave pets at home, since the day is very busy and typically warm. The 2027 edition is set for Saturday, April 17, rain or shine.

Cow chips and chicks before noon

The Lions Club serves a community breakfast from 8 to 11. At 10, in front of McNear’s Saloon on Petaluma Boulevard North, the Cow Chip Throwing Contest begins. Visit Petaluma counts more than 100 entrants, each throwing a painted cow chip or donkey apple for distance.

At 10:15 the Cutest Little Chick Contest, presented by Petaluma Egg Farm, starts in front of Copperfield’s Books on Kentucky Street. Babies and toddlers in feathers and beaks are carried before the judges, and newspaper photographers have covered it year after year:

• In 2015 five-month-old Alexander Mainaris lost his hat while his father, Chris, held him up to the judges.
• The same year, one-year-old Israel Edwards tried to make a break for it before the contest began.
• In 2025 eight-week-old Willow Simonton fell asleep during the contest.

The contest drew a record 86 entrants in 2016. For 2026 entries were capped at 60.

Live music plays near the vendor stalls from 10 to noon. Pre-parade entertainment follows at 11:15, and at 11:30 children march in the Clover Kids’ Parade.

The parade from Walnut Park

At noon the parade leaves its traditional starting point at Walnut Park. It follows Fourth Street to Kentucky, turns right on Washington Street, turns right again on Petaluma Boulevard, and returns to Walnut Park. Each year carries a theme. In 2026 the theme was “America’s Birthday — Petaluma Style,” marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and the Downtown Association counted 151 entries and 3,370 participants.

David Templeton’s account of the 2026 parade in the Press Democrat describes temperatures climbing toward the mid-70s under a nearly cloudless sky. The entries included:

• the Petaluma Garden Club, walking beside its float in bright yellow chicken feet and calling “Let’s scramble” as it moved off
• a giant papier-mâché stack of pancakes on the Sax Joint restaurant float
• an accordion player in a vintage car, promoting the Cotati Accordion Festival
• chicken-suited unicyclists and butterfly-winged stilt-walkers
• the Unicorn Blessing Brigade in inflatable unicorn costumes
• at least one person dressed as Evel Knievel

The theme brought out puns. Harmony Farm Supply & Nursery’s float carried a banner reading “Red, White & Bloom.” Sloat Nursery’s banner read “Life, Liberty & the Pursuit of Tomatoes.” Supporters of Seraphim Studios wore T-shirts reading “In Dance We Trust.” Haulmark Junk Removal and Recycling built a float with a chicken bathing in a tub of white balloon bubbles and a rooster in an American flag cape. Its painted sign read “250 Years: Cluck Yeah America!”

The Cutest Little Chick float carried the contest winners. Strapped to its grill was an enormous egg with big eyes, a baffled expression and an Uncle Sam hat. Cheers greeted it, and one parade-watcher called out, “It’s like an open house at the pre-school on the Island of Doctor Moreau.” Templeton also recorded the smells along the route: hot dogs, burgers, fried chicken and garlic fries, with vehicle exhaust and farm animals.

Bands and dancers enter for prizes. In 2025 Lagunitas Brewing Co. took first place for Best Non-Commercial Band, and Paquiyollotzin Ballet Folkloric of Petaluma took second for Best Performance Group. The Casa Grande Gaucho marching band marched that year, and Espinoza Family and Friends of Galt sang “Sweet Caroline” along the route. In 2026 the Kenilworth Junior High School marching band was in the line.

After the parade the festival fills four blocks with food, crafts, craft beer, two kids’ areas and live music. Two beverage gardens stay open until 3:30, and main-stage music runs from 2 to 4. The 2026 festival map also showed a climbing wall, a giant slide, a petting zoo, pony rides and a marked cow-chipping area.

A librarian and a McNear descendant

Butter & Egg Days opens a week early, at noon on the Saturday before the parade, at the Petaluma Historical Library and Museum. In 2026 that was April 11. Mayor Kevin McDonnell and other dignitaries were scheduled to read proclamations honoring the year’s Good Egg and the parade’s grand marshal, and to announce the opening of History Week. Both honorees then ride in the parade.

The Good Egg Award honors people who work to keep Petaluma’s history alive. Previous Good Eggs choose each new one. The Argus-Courier dates the first honoree to 1983. The 2026 recipient, Connie Williams, followed 45 before her. She has run the History Room at the Petaluma Regional Library since 2018, behind a glass partition, among city directories, high school yearbooks, diaries, business ledgers and scrapbooks. Before that she spent 28 years as a teacher-librarian at Kenilworth Jr. High and Petaluma High School, and she co-created Luma-Con, the city’s comic-book and pop-culture festival. “I’m usually the person behind the curtain, not in front of it,” she said.

The 2026 grand marshal, Heidi Kühn, is the great-great-granddaughter of John McNear, whose name is on schools, buildings and other Petaluma landmarks. In 1997 she founded Roots of Peace, which replaces landmines with vineyards and orchards. “It’s an honor to be selected as grand marshal. It’s bringing it all back home for me,” she told the Argus-Courier.

The Egg Basket of the World

The egg in the parade’s name goes back to 1879. That year Lyman Byce invented an incubator that held 103 degrees Fahrenheit for three weeks, which freed hens to lay more eggs. The Single Comb White Leghorn, a hen that laid 200 eggs a year, came next, and Petaluma’s egg production rose sharply.

Writing in the Press Democrat in 2017, Janet Balicki said that by 1918 a Chamber of Commerce campaign had named Petaluma the “Egg Basket of the World” and started the Egg Days Parade. In a Sonoma Index-Tribune piece the same year, she placed that campaign in the 1920s. The Downtown Association credits booster Bert Kerrigan, who worked from 1918 to 1926 and made Petaluma known with the phrase “The World’s Egg Basket.” His National Egg Days celebrations inspired the parade, and the Good Egg Award recognizes his promotion of the town.

Petalumans marched in fluffy chicken costumes, and giant frying pans went on display. The event was so popular that the governor attended. Sonoma County Library photographs show:

• the Egg Day celebration of 1920
• women posing with a large frying pan in 1923
• four boys dressed as chickens pulling an egg float on Main Street near Hill Plaza Park about 1923
• four women with an extra-large basket of eggs about 1926

The original parade ended in 1926. In 1982 the Petaluma Downtown Association revived it and added butter to the name, to mark the dairy industry’s connection to the town. The 2026 parade was the 43rd since the revival, not counting the pandemic year. The first Butter & Egg Days “Cutest Little Chick in Town” was named in 1989: Collene Camill, who was 28 when the Index-Tribune ran her picture in 2017.