The August bank holiday is approaching, but in Waterford you'd hardly know it. In the south-eastern capital, it's the Spraoi weekend and nothing else which is just around the corner.
What began as an idea to start a percussion group, conceived over a bottle of tequila, has been transformed in just six years into the biggest festival in the region.
This year's Spraoi Festival, which opens on Friday, will include nearly 350 events at venues throughout the city. But such statistics do not give an impression of the party atmosphere which envelops Waterford for the three days.
T.V. Honan, one of the dreamers who helped to empty that bottle of tequila, refers to the event as "the biggest communal gathering in Waterford", a few days in the year when differences are put aside and the people of the city unite with a single purpose: namely, to have a ball.
Most of the events in Spraoi take place outdoors and all of them are free, so there's a strong emphasis on family participation. But the partying doesn't stop after the children have gone to bed; some publicans in the city say it's a busier time than Christmas.
Highlights of this year's festival include performance artists such as Bedlam Oz from Australia, A und P Theater from Germany, Masamba from Dublin, Suzy Leach from Australia, magician Pat Fallon, comedian Dave Holder, the Invisible Men, the Primitives and Jason Maverick.
Music events include performances by traditional group Kila, Taiko drum band Mugenkyo, Zimbabwean a capella and dance group Black Umfolosi, Latin American musicians Otra Vez, The Hooligans from Australia, and Tziganarama, who play a variety of styles from eastern Europe.
As always, however, the highlight of the festival will be Sunday's night-time parade, even if it rains.
"Time" is the theme of this year's parade, and this week everything from giant water-spraying spiders to cuckoo clocks were being sculpted, hammered and welded into shape at Spraoi's headquarters at The Glen. Even T.V. Honan is temporarily at a loss to explain the significance of the spider.
"We don't try to tell a story. It's pure spectacle, a whole range of light and sound," he said. The spider, reveals Clare Horgan, one of the parade's artistic directors, is simply being called "the spider of time", after a failure to decide between the "clock roach" and the millennium bug.
For several months now, Clare and her team have been stitching together the costumes for the parade's 167 participants, using every available material from old bicycle tyres to feather dusters. The people in Spraoi are good at this kind of thing, having won the best float award at this year's St Patrick's Day Festival in Dublin.
As the parade time approaches on Sunday, the scene will be one of "complete madness", said Clare, as nearly 170 people try to fit into their costumes ("There are two sizes, large and small") and have their faces painted.
The whole event is put together with the help of countless voluntary workers, supporting a full-time team of just five and others employed on a FAS community scheme. As if to emphasise the democratic nature of the event, the Spraoi parade is unusual in that there's no reviewing stand; none of the anticipated 30,000 spectators gets special treatment.
No one is complaining except, perhaps, about the odd hangover come Monday morning.