Celebrate Anderson, Hot Air Affair Join Forces for Labor Day Concerts, Celebrations
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
Anderson County has ushered in Labor Day weekend for years, with events, concerts and other celebrations, all free to the public.
Things kick off Sept. 4 with the Cancer Association of Anderson’s “Hot Air Affair: Rising Above Cancer” which offers another full day of events Sept. 5 only to be joined by Celebrate Anderson Sept. 6, an event which aims to expand into a festival weekend that seems designed to turn the county’s bicentennial into a single, sprawling gesture of gratitude and self-regard.
Angie Stringer, the executive director of the Cancer Association of Anderson, said the Hot Air Affair is entering its ninth year as a signature fundraiser for local cancer patients, born out of her own affection for balloons and hardened, in the way such things sometimes are, by personal necessity. She described the event’s name as a kind of directive—rising above cancer—and tied its origin to her own diagnosis, when seeing a balloon overhead after chemo became a kind of moral instruction.
This year’s Hot Air Affair, set for Sept. 4-6, will bring more than 40 balloons to the balloon launch field and expand its offerings with a rural agricultural expo inside the Civic Center, meant to restore a little of the old fair spirit to Anderson County. Stringer said the expo will include livestock, cooking demonstrations, a Scottish Highland cow appearance, and even the possibility of a pie-eating contest, while the weekend itself will include vendors, a kids zone, a car show, a motorcycle ride by the U.S. Combat Veterans, a color run and balloon glows and flights, all of which remain subject, as ballooning always does, to the sky’s unpredictable temperament.
The county’s contribution, Celebrate Anderson, now in its 27th year and, according to Deputy Administrator Matt Hogan, likely to be the largest free Labor Day weekend celebration in South Carolina.
Celebrate Anderson began in 1998 with a simple idea: to bring the county’s municipalities together for one common civic party, and this year it arrives not just as entertainment but as part of Anderson County’s bicentennial, a 200-year marker the county is using to look both backward and ahead.
Because the amphitheater is under renovation, Celebrate Anderson will move to the balloon launch field, where it will share space with the Hot Air Affair and, in a way, borrow some of its weather-dependent spectacle. Hogan said the move allows the county to showcase the launch field itself while keeping the festival free and drawing the county’s sponsors and its crowds into one place. He said the county expects more than 30,000 visitors over the weekend and emphasized that the whole event remains free because of sponsors such as Michelin, Duke Energy, Tri-County Technical College and Arthrex.
The festival’s main-stage concert lineup will include South Carolina acts Dani Rucker and indie rock band WinYa, followed by Yacht Rock Schooner. The weekend will end with a synchronized drone-and-fireworks show honoring Anderson County’s 200th year. Hogan said the Sunday-night finale was made possible by a donor who asked not to be named, and that the best view will be from the balloon launch field itself.
What gives the combined events their charge is not simply scale but the way they now mirror each other. The Hot Air Affair exists to help cancer patients, the county’s celebration exists to bind the county together, and in 2026 the two will occupy the same ground, one more private in its purpose and the other more public, but both animated by the same local instinct to make a spectacle serve a community.
