Trinkets, Treats, and Toys at Oklahoma Renaissance Festival

May 13, 2024

Kristi Roe Owen,

Since Oklahoma’s wild weather pushed us back a week, we finally made it out to the Oklahoma Renaissance Festival for the second weekend. After initially planning to dress for King Oberon’s weekend, we quickly shifted gears and dressed ourselves up for Ren faire pirate weekend. We then spent the entire day complimenting ourselves on our pirate theme and making pirate puns and commentary to everyone we met only to realize at the end of the day that we had dressed for the completely wrong weekend.

Despite my literally writing a blog post about it, I apparently can’t read and completely got the weekends mixed up. Fortunately, the Renaissance faire is a pretty mixed bag of weird and wonderful cosplays, and no one seemed to care. But then again, they were probably too busy checking out all the awesome vendors. And by golly were there a lot of wonderful vendors at the Castle this year.

Because the Ren faire wouldn’t be complete without souvenirs, I wanted to highlight some of the absolutely mesmerizing merchandise, gorgeous garb, and tasty treats we were obsessed with this year. But first, a word about trinkets.

Trinket Collecting at the Ren Faire

We’ve encountered trinket culture at genre conventions and had folks give the kids one or two small items at Ren fairies past. But this year, trinket culture seems to have completely blown up at the Oklahoma festival — and I’m so here for it because it gives kids a specific adventure to focus on and a chance to take something special home that doesn’t cost a dime. After all, the faire can get pretty spendy fast.

Trinketing is exactly what it sounds like — the practice of cosplayers sharing or trading trinkets. And Luci, being the gregarious soul she is, found folks giving her trinkets throughout our day at the Castle — usually after telling them she liked their costume. By the end of the day, she had amassed such a collection that I gave her a special wooden trinket box to keep them. You can find out more about trinket trading — including ideas for trinkets you might want to bring and share — in the Facebook group Trinkets of Ren Faire.

Parenting tip: Bring a pouch (like a sunglasses or jewelry pouch) to collect your kids’ trinkets in.

Shopping for Cosplay

If you’ve been feeling like you want to dress up for the festival but you don’t have a thing to wear, there’s no better place to start putting together your Renaissance look than the Castle. That’s because unlike the garb you can purchase from big vendors online, most of the items at the festival are painstakingly handmade by artists and artisans.

Custom Regalia Leather Masks & Accessories

In a world plagued by fast fashion, you can expect to pay a pretty penny for the higher quality garb you can pick up at the Renaissance festival. It’s best to think of it more as an investment, picking up a piece or two each year and adding to your collection as the opportunity arises. And it’s not just corsets and shifts — you can pick up custom elf ears, traditional Viking attire, leather goods, chain mail, artfully crafted masks, parasols, millinery, faerie bells, and loads of other dreamy accessories.

Mother Hatty’s Hat Shoppe

Sustenance for Your Travels

Like all good parents, I always throw a few granola bars in my bag in case someone decides they’re dying of hunger at the most inopportune moments. But they’re usually only used on the ride back to Tulsa since there’s tons of delicious food all over the faire.

For the second year in a row, the grown-ups in our crew have picked up a slice of boozy cake from inside the castle. This year, I went for the pineapple upside down cake with rum. We also grubbed up on an embarrassment of chicken tenders from Castleton Harbor, downed some lemonade from the Castle’s refillable souvenir cups, and noshed out on one of our favorite Renaissance faire treats, freshly popped kettle corn.

Black Boar Pub

Other Magical Wares

I absolutely love the fact that everywhere you look at the Renaissance faire, you can find gorgeous, artisanal goods. This year, Arthur and Lucy fulfilled a years-running wish to pick up Dragon Pets — unique, individually handcrafted dragon puppets that wrap around their wrists. Their dragons even came with leather armor and glow in the dark!

We also spent far too long swooning over musical instruments like hand drums and didgeridoos; blacksmith-forged knives, daggers, and swords; beautifully carved walking sticks; and countless other wares.