Each New Year’s Eve, thousands of people in Port Clinton affix their eyes on a 600 lb. fiberglass fish. Cheers erupted as a crane slowly lowered Wylie the Walleye on the final night of 2023.
“Port Clinton, we’re about to drop a walleye out of the sky!” an announcer exclaimed to the crowd of festival goers at last year’s drop.
As the clock strikes midnight, millions of people around the world will eagerly watch the iconic ball drop at Times Square in New York City. Some Ohio communities, like Port Clinton, have taken that tradition and made it their own.
The Walleye drop is the Lake Erie-side city’s annual New Year’s Eve celebration that’s lasted more than a quarter of a century. Around 7,000 people ring in the New Year with Wylie.
“We are considered the walleye capital of the world,” said organizer Kristina Tilson. “So why not drop a fish?”
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The fishy festival is one of the state’s longest standing New Year’s Eve events. But Port Clinton is far from the only community that gets creative. Many Ohio towns use the last night of the year to rally around what’s important in their community.
Pop and drop
Marion rings in the New Year with what matters most to the town: popcorn.
“It’s always been a popcorn hub for not only the state but also the world,” said Zac Fuller is the owner of Newsforce 24/7, the host of Marion’s Rockin’ Poppin’ New Years Eve Celebration.
Thanks to Wyandot Snacks, the north central Ohio city was once a top exporter of the movie snack. Marion houses the Wyandot Popcorn Museum and hosts an annual Marion Popcorn Festival. So, it only made sense to create an illuminated ball that looks like a kernel of popcorn to drop at the stroke of midnight. It’s been a tradition in town since 2008.
“That's a heritage,” Fuller said. “That is what we try to keep alive and letting people know that, ‘Hey, we're still proud of where we came from.’”
And they’re not the only ones that congregate around popped kernels. Chagrin Falls, a suburb of Cleveland, drops the real deal: a six foot, 200-hundred plus pound ball of actual popcorn, affectionately dubbed Jupiter.
Tasty traditions
Other Ohio communities take the night just to celebrate their favorite local cuisine. Once every five years, the village of Elmore in northwest Ohio drops an 18-foot glowing sausage at midnight. It’s preceded, of course, by a sausage eating competition.
In Lakeside, a historic neighborhood in northern Ohio, they drop donuts. Carol Rinehart and her husband Ron began the sweet tradition as a joke.
“My husband put a bag of powdered sugar donuts on a fishing pole and dropped them at midnight,” Carol said. “And that was the first donut drop.”
The couple decided to turn the donut drop into a community event with free donuts from a local bakery. That second year, more than a hundred people huddled together to eat pastries and watched as an inflatable donut on a string was lowered in the center of Lakeside.
“This crowd of people just showed up. We started cutting donuts in half because we knew we didn't buy enough for that big of a crowd,” Carol recalled.
Having a ball
Some communities, like Dayton, embrace a traditional ball drop. Others just alter the tradition slightly to better fit the feel of their towns.
In Lancaster, their New Year’s Eve ball is entirely made of glass ornaments to reflect the city’s history as a glass manufacturer. Amanda Everitt, with Destination Downtown Lancaster, said each ornament is hand-crafted by residents.
“It feels good that we have something that's decidedly Lancaster and local,” Everitt said. “It truly does feel very much like we're living in a Hallmark holiday movie.”
And it helps local businesses start with a boom. Everitt said the Glass Town Countdown brings in tourists across the region to shop in town. The same is true in Port Clinton. Wylie the Walleye brings around $500,000 to the fishing town each year.
Regardless of what’s being dropped – whether fish, ornaments or bratwurst – many small Ohio cities have come to count on these countdowns to ring in the new year with a celebration of their community.
“We all count down to this wonderful midnight celebration where this lit art piece gets raised at the stroke of midnight with a backdrop of fireworks off of the tops of the buildings,” Everitt said. “It's really, really exciting and incredible.”
