A storm forecast is usually a scheduling problem with one solution: pick a new date and move on. What happened to Lake Como's fall calendar this week is a little more interesting than that. The nor'easter that triggered a Monmouth County state of emergency on September 25 didn't just bump one event into October. It pushed the borough's 30th anniversary Lake Como Day celebration onto the same weekend as Belmar's 18th annual D'Jais Resident Thank You Party, stacking two of the area's marquee community events into a single 24-hour window that residents wouldn't otherwise see paired together.
If you live here, that matters more than the weather did.
What the Storm Actually Moved
Governor Mikie Sherrill declared the state of emergency effective 5 p.m. on Friday, September 25, covering Monmouth County along with seven others as forecasters warned of coastal flooding, sustained winds of 30 to 40 mph, gusts up to 60 mph, and significant beach erosion running through the weekend. That forecast was strong enough that organizers didn't wait to see how bad it got. Two events scheduled for that Friday and Saturday were pulled from the calendar in advance.
Lake Como Day & Fireworks, originally set for Saturday, September 26 from 3 to 9 p.m. along the lakefront, is now scheduled for Saturday, October 10. Belmar's D'Jais Resident Thank You Party, which had been set for Friday, September 25, moves to Sunday, October 11 at 4 p.m. Neither event is being skipped this year. Both are simply landing a little more than two weeks later than planned, and now one day apart from each other instead of on separate weekends entirely.
That second detail is the one worth sitting with. In a typical year, Lake Como Day and the D'Jais party don't overlap. This year, the storm compressed them into back-to-back days.
The New October Weekend, Laid Out
Here's how the rescheduled stretch actually reads on a calendar:
| Date | Event | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Sunday, Oct. 4 | Mushfest 2026, live sets from Mushmouth and Suit and Mai Tai | Bar Anticipation, 703 16th Ave |
| Saturday, Oct. 10 | Lake Como Day & Fireworks (30th anniversary) | Lake Como lakefront |
| Sunday, Oct. 11, 4 p.m. | D'Jais Resident Thank You Party (18th annual) | Ocean Avenue, Belmar |
Lake Como Day's rescheduled program keeps its original lineup: live music from E-Doro Bandits and Shut Up Gus, food trucks, a beer and wine garden, pumpkin painting, free rides, face painting, and a petting zoo, closing out with fireworks over the lake. It's the 30th time the borough has run this specific celebration, a milestone organizers didn't want to fold into a rain date without comment.
What that means in practice is a nine-day stretch, October 4 through October 11, carrying more organized community programming than Lake Como and its immediate neighbors usually pack into most of a month. If you were planning around "things settle down after Labor Day," that assumption just got overtaken by events, literally.
Why the Compression Is the Real Story
A single postponed festival is routine. Two festivals from two different towns landing on consecutive days, both explicitly framed as thank-you events for residents, is not something that happens by design. Lake Como Day has run for three decades as the borough's own celebration of itself, tied loosely to the fact that Lake Como is marking its 102nd year as an independent municipality, having incorporated in 1924 as South Belmar before residents voted to rename it in 2005. The D'Jais party, on the other hand, is Belmar's way of thanking its own residents once the summer crowds thin out, a tradition now in its 18th year.
These two events were never built to run together. The storm didn't cancel either one, it just removed the two and a half weeks of separation that usually keeps them from competing for the same Saturday-night attention. For residents who move between both towns without thinking much about municipal borders, which plenty of people here do given how close Main Street sits to the Belmar line, this year's version means picking which thank-you party gets the Saturday and which gets the Sunday, rather than having a full weekend to spend on each.
The Businesses Anchoring the Weekend
None of this runs without a specific set of local names doing the actual work. Lake Como Day's companion 5K, an annual morning race presented by the Jersey Shore Running Club, is hosted out of Joe's Surf Shack on 18th Avenue, with sponsorship from Bar Anticipation, La Sierra, and Turnstile Coffee Roasters. Proceeds from the race go to the borough's Youth Recreation Programs and youth facilities, which is part of why organizers were reluctant to let a storm erase the day entirely rather than just move it.
Main Street itself carries the daily version of that same civic weight. Lake Como Wine Shop, Paul's Tavern, Sonny's Bar & Grill, Jersey Burger, Weinstein Liquor Store, and Little Fish Co. line the short stretch that runs between Belmar to the north and Spring Lake to the south, the same stretch that will be quietly busier than usual for the back half of the coming week as both towns gear up for their rescheduled celebrations. None of these businesses needed a festival to matter to the block. But when the calendar compresses two big weekends into nine days, the everyday spots absorb a lot of the overflow foot traffic that would otherwise have been spread out.
The Lake Doesn't Rearrange Itself
Everything above is about scheduling, which is to say it's temporary by nature. The lake at the center of the borough isn't. It still runs its rubberized walking path along the south side, its butterfly garden, its picnic tables, and its fishing access exactly the way it did before the storm and exactly the way it will after October 11 has come and gone. Whatever happens with fireworks dates or thank-you party timing, that loop around the water remains the one constant piece of daily life here, storm or no storm, festival weekend or ordinary Tuesday.
That's worth remembering if you're trying to get a feel for what living in Lake Como actually looks like day to day, separate from any single weekend's programming. The borough is 0.26 square miles, one of the smallest in the state, and the lake sits at the center of nearly everyone's routine regardless of what's happening on the festival calendar that particular month.
What This Means If You're Watching From Outside
For residents, the practical takeaway is straightforward. Mark October 10 for Lake Como Day and October 11 for the D'Jais party if you want to catch both without a scheduling conflict, and expect Bar Anticipation's Mushfest on October 4 to be the warmup act for a stretch of fall programming that's now denser than usual. For anyone watching Lake Como from a distance, the more durable signal is what this compressed calendar reveals about the town underneath it: a 102-year-old borough small enough that a single storm can visibly rearrange its social calendar, and cohesive enough that when it does, residents notice exactly what moved and why.
You can find more on the neighborhoods around Lake Como and its Main Street corridor on our Lake Como neighborhood page, and on the Belmar events that now share this same October weekend at our Belmar neighborhood page. Full details on the storm's timeline and the borough's announcement are available through TAPinto's Belmar/Lake Como coverage, and registration details for the Lake Como Day 5K are posted on RunSignUp.
If you're thinking about what it actually feels like to live somewhere small enough for a single weekend to shift the whole town's rhythm, Carly Ringer knows Lake Como and its neighbors block by block. Let's Connect.
