Today, if you check the Village of Clemmons' official events page, you'll see the Clemmons Food Pantry's "Drive Away Hunger" golf tournament teeing off at Tanglewood's Championship Course this afternoon. Tomorrow morning, the same page has the Dirty Dozen 5K and Fun Run Obstacle Mud Run, followed by Clemmons Oktoberfest at the Jerry Long Family YMCA. That's the calendar everyone in Clemmons already half-knows about, the one built around the YMCA and the county parks system.
What that page doesn't show you is that at the exact same hour the mud run kicks off Saturday, a book market opens ten minutes away at a coffee shop most of Clemmons has never had a reason to visit. Two events, same morning, same zip code, and only one of them shows up if you're relying on the Village's own calendar to tell you what's happening in your own town.
The Circuit the Village Actually Publishes
The Dirty Dozen 5K and Fun Run Obstacle Mud Run returns for its eighth year this Saturday, September 12, at the Jerry Long Family YMCA on South Peace Haven Road. The fun run heats start at 7:30 a.m. and the 5K heats follow at 8:10, both running in waves every ten minutes through the morning. Proceeds go toward YMCA health programs built for cancer survivors and people managing chronic disease, which is part of why this race has stuck around long enough to hit its eighth annual run.
Clemmons Oktoberfest runs alongside it from 8 a.m. to noon, same address, free to walk in. It folds in a beer pit, the regular Saturday farmers market, and a Touch-a-Truck setup for kids, which is the kind of stacking that happens when a town runs most of its big public gatherings through one recreation hub. A week later, on September 19, that same hub extends out to Tanglewood Park for Athena's Run for GYN Cancers 5K, and on Tuesday mornings, a walking group called Step Sisters meets at Tanglewood for laps that never make it onto anyone's Instagram feed but keep happening anyway.
This is Clemmons' institutional calendar. It's real, it's well attended, and it's easy to find, because it's the version the Village, the YMCA, and Forsyth County Parks and Recreation all have an incentive to publicize. If you've lived in Clemmons for more than a season, you've probably already been to three or four of these without thinking of them as a system.
The Circuit Nobody's Advertising for You
The Wandering Shire Book Market opens at 10 a.m. this Saturday at Be Kind Coffee Co. on Clemmons Road, the same morning as the mud run and Oktoberfest a few minutes away. It won't be on the Village's calendar page, because Be Kind Coffee Co. isn't a Village facility. It's an independent shop, and like most independent shops in Clemmons, its events live wherever the owner decides to post them, usually somewhere between social media and a regional events aggregator, not on any government site a resident might think to check.
The same pattern shows up on the other end of fall. Village Square Tap House is hosting a Halloween costume party on October 31 with live music from Pandora's Jukebox Band and the Jill Goodson Band, and unless you already follow the Tap House directly, there's a real chance you find out about it the week of, if at all.
Here's the split laid out plainly:
| Event | Date | Venue | Where you'd actually find it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dirty Dozen 5K & Fun Run / Oktoberfest | Sept 12, 2026 | Jerry Long Family YMCA | Village of Clemmons calendar |
| Wandering Shire Book Market | Sept 12, 2026 | Be Kind Coffee Co. | Independent listing only |
| Athena's Run for GYN Cancers 5K | Sept 19, 2026 | Tanglewood Park | Village of Clemmons calendar |
| Halloween Costume Party | Oct 31, 2026 | Village Square Tap House | Independent listing only |
| Pumpkin Pick Hay Rides | October, weekends | Tanglewood Stables | Stables' own site |
Neither circuit is trying to hide from the other. They just grew up on different infrastructure, one funded by membership dues and county budgets, the other funded by whoever owns the storefront. If you only track one, you're only getting half of what's actually happening in your own town this fall.
Why the Split Persists
It comes down to who's doing the publishing and what they're publishing for. The Village's calendar exists to serve residents information about Village-run and Village-partnered programming, which means YMCA races and county park events. A coffee shop hosting a book market has no obligation to feed that system, and honestly no real incentive to either, since its customer base finds it through word of mouth and its own following, not through municipal recreation newsletters.
That's not a complaint about either side. It's just a fact about how a town like Clemmons, still mid-transition from bedroom community to something with an actual walkable center around Village Point, ends up with two calendars instead of one. The YMCA-and-parks circuit is the load-bearing structure. The small-business circuit is what makes the town feel like somewhere people actually want to spend a Saturday morning, not just drive through on the way to Winston-Salem.
What Comes After This Weekend
Once the mud dries and the beer pit closes down, the fall calendar doesn't slow down so much as it shifts location. Tanglewood Stables opens its Pumpkin Pick Hay Rides for October weekends, $11 per person or $220 for a private group booking, and that's one of the few events on this list that splits the difference between the two circuits. It's run out of Tanglewood, which is county-owned, but it's booked and marketed like an independent business because that's effectively what the stables operation is.
By early November, the early buildup to Tanglewood's Festival of Lights usually starts showing up around town, ahead of the drive-through show that's been running since 1992 and now covers roughly four miles with around 180 light displays. It's been recognized as one of the top 20 events in the Southeast, which is the kind of thing that's easy to forget is happening in Clemmons specifically until the first cold snap reminds you.
If you want to actually catch both circuits this fall instead of defaulting to whichever one happens to cross your feed, a few habits help more than any single calendar bookmark:
- Check the Village of Clemmons calendar for anything YMCA, Tanglewood, or county-run, since that's where the institutional events reliably post first.
- Follow the specific storefronts directly, not just a general "Clemmons events" search, since that's the only way book markets, tap house parties, and one-off pop-ups reach you before the week they happen.
- Treat Tanglewood as its own category. Some of what happens there is county-calendar official, and some, like the stables' hay rides, is booked independently even though the location is public land.
None of this changes what Clemmons is. It just means the town runs on two separate publicity systems that happen to share a zip code, and the fuller version of living here means checking both instead of assuming one covers it.
If you're already living in Clemmons and want more on what makes specific pockets of the village tick day to day, the Clemmons neighborhood guide rounds up more of that texture. And if a friend or family member ever asks you what it's actually like to live here, Karen Swicegood is always glad to talk through the neighborhoods, the calendar, and everything in between. Schedule your free consultation whenever the timing's right.
