Here’s your curated mostly-Hartford event calendar for January 2025.

What makes this list? Events that I would either attend or recommend to a good friend.
Review events with the host/venue to confirm details have not changed since publication.

  • FIRST DAY HIKE: You can do this solo or find a group hike elsewhere in the state, but for the Greater Hartford area, get over to Auerfarm in Bloomfield on January 1, 2025 at 1 PM. This is a short, 10-minute walk with refreshments at the summit. Registration is required.
  • HANUKKAH CANDLE LIGHTING: The Hartford Jewish Organizing Collective has collectively organized a public menorah lighting by the West Hartford Public Library on January 1, 2025 at 4:30 PM. Meet up by the giant statue of Noah Webster. B.Y.O. Menorah.
  • FIRST THURSDAYS: Get down to the Wadsworth Atheneum when it is free for all and after first shift. The Free First Thursday event on January 2, 2025 begins at 5 PM and gets you access to the galleries, including the stunning Divine Geometry exhibit. There are puzzles and journaling activities available for those who want something to do besides look at art. At 7:30, they will show the 1977 animated adaptation of The Hobbit. Yes, the one you watched in high school English class.
  • DRAG RACE WATCH PARTY: On January 3, 2025 and other Fridays, visit Parkville Market to watch season 17 of RuPaul’s Drag Race. Gather at 7 PM; show is at 8 PM. Free.
  • FIRST SATURDAY HIKE: Were you looking for an excuse to take the train to New Haven? At 10 AM on January 4, 2025 there will be a walk/hike so people can explore concepts for connecting the Shoreline Greenway Trail from New Haven to West Haven. This is going to be about four miles of walking in two hours — sidewalk, stone dust path, mainly. The walk begins at The Boathouse at Canal Dock in New Haven. You can see the route here.  Part of it goes through the Long Wharf Nature Preserve.
  • COFFEE RIDE: Join other cyclists to ride from Hartford’s Bushnell Park to Birdhouse Coffee Bar & Kitchen in South Windsor and back on Saturday mornings. Gather at 8 AM by the Sailors and Soldiers Memorial Arch; ride begins at 8:15 AM. This is a 20-mile ride over about three hours. No cyclist left behind. People bike year-round, so as long as temps are in the double digits, the ride should be happening. Get yourself on the Heylo group to be in touch with organizers. There is no cost to participate, aside from whatever snacks you decide to buy at Birdhouse.
  • MOVEMENT WORKSHOP: The Hartford Dance Collective is offering a free movement class for people age 16+ at the New Britain Museum of American Art at 10:30 every Saturday morning in January.
  •  DIVINE GEOMETRY: Hamid Hemat, Wadsworth exhibitions manager and exhibition curator, will be giving a talk about objects in the Divine Geometry exhibit. This is on January 4, 2025 at 1 PM. This is free with admission; admission is free for Hartford residents.
  • BABY GRAND JAZZ: With the partially-reopened downtown library, you can now browse (some) books again while listening to live jazz music on Sundays. The music is from 3-4 PM, and the lineup includes: January 5, 2025 –  Chloe Madrak; January 12 – MNM Trio with Josh Bruneau; January 19 – Charlie Apicelli & Alexis Marcelo; and January 26 – Michelle Tucker Quintet & Strings. Free.
  •  SEE CAMELS: The Dia de Reyes (Three Kings Day) procession down Park Street begins around 10 AM in the area of 95 Park, and will make its way to the Pope Park Rec Center in Pope Park. This is on January 6, 2025. Unless you want to be miserable, dress for the weather we’re having!
  • DIY DREAM MUGS: Use a cricut machine to create a mug expressing your dreams. BTW, that word is pronounced “cricket” which I only recently learned and am deeply bothered by because back in the day we just called ’em die cut machines, so why wouldn’t this rhyme with that?! Either way, this is a free workshop at the Barbour branch of the Hartford Public Library and to register, you need to make a phone call to Irene, 860-695-7401. (Since a phone call is required, I vote that we fully return to those days of phone calls by changing the way this machine’s name is pronounced). This is on January 8, 2025 at 2 PM and is geared for adults.
  •  READING FOR CHANGE: James McBride’s novel The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is the book being talked about this month. They describe it as: “In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Moshe integrated his theater and where Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. When the state came looking for a deaf boy to institutionalize him, it was Chona and Nate Timblin, the Black janitor at Moshe’s theater and the unofficial leader of the Black community on Chicken Hill, who worked together to keep the boy safe.” You don’t have to have read the book to participate in this free, virtual chat offered by the Stowe Center on January 8, 2025 at 6 PM. Register online to get the meeting link.
  • FOODSHARE: Connecticut Foodshare will be at the Barbour Branch of the Hartford Public Library on January 9 & 23, 2025 from 3-4 PM. Go if you’d like a free bag of groceries.
  •  FRESH INK: Vivian Nabeta will be in conversation with Mai Sennaar, author of They Dream in Gold. They say “this luminous novel explores themes of identity, belonging, and the intergenerational bonds that unite us.” Catch them at the Twain House & Museum on January 9, 2025 at 7 PM. Tickets are $10.
  • THE WHALERS: Cinestudio is having one screening of the documentary film The Whalers on January 11, 2025 at 2 PM. This is the world premiere with a panel Q&A. Tickets are about $20.
  •  BOAR’S HEAD AND YULE LOG FESTIVAL: Celebrate the Epiphany with a church-filled with live animals. It’s more than that, but really, if it were only the animals, it would have been enough. Asylum Hill Congregational Church hosts this very popular event every year, so if you want to go, don’t wait until the last minute thinking tickets will be available. There are two afternoon and two evening events on January 11 & 12, 2025. Ticket prices vary; children under age 5 are not admitted.
  • MLK TRIVIA: Adults can test out their MLK, Jr.-related knowledge with a trivia game at the Hartford Public Library’s Dwight branch on January 14, 2025 from 2-2:45 PM.
  • WINTER WARM HANDS: Free winter essentials while supplies last at the Park Street branch of the Hartford Public Library. January 14, 2025 from 3-5 PM. Play your cards right and you could hit trivia first, get on the bus, and make it to this event right after. Pub crawl, but make it library branches.
  • FEMINIST ADVOCACY: Jillian Gilchrest will be at the Katharine Seymour Day House to talk about her new book Feminist Advocacy: Championing Gender and Social Justice. This free event is on January 15, 2025 at 6 PM.

  •  WASTE LAND: This film is being shown at the New Britain Museum of American Art on January 19, 2025 at 10:30 AM. They say: “Filmed over nearly three years, Waste Land follows renowned artist Vik Muniz as he journeys from his home base in Brooklyn to his native Brazil and the world’s largest garbage dump, Jardim Gramacho, located on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. There he photographs an eclectic band of catadores — or garbage pickers. The catadores are the ultimate marginalized population; unemployed in any traditional sense of the word, they resort to picking valuable recyclable materials from the garbage thrown away by those in Brazil more fortunate than themselves. But they display remarkably good spirits and camaraderie in the face of their lot in life, forming friendships and, in the case of the elderly Valter, declaring the crucial and meaningful role they play in remediating the results of the modern culture of overconsumption and careless disposal. Under the leadership of the young, charismatic picker Tião, they have even created a co-operative to pool their labor and resources to maximize their income.” Ticket prices vary.
  • AIN’T NO BACK TO A MERRY-GO-ROUND: The Hartford Jewish Film Festival goes from January until April. This particular film screens at 3 PM on January 19, 2025 at the Mandell JCC in West Hartford. They describe this documentary film: “When five Howard University students sat on a segregated Maryland carousel in 1960, the arrests made headlines. When the largely Jewish community near Glen Echo Amusement Park joined the Black students in picketing, the first organized interracial civil rights protest in US history was born. The pickets attracted Nazis, Congressmen, and a press avalanche. Picketing together for these unlikely allies led to partying together, and union organizers mentored student activists. Ten 1961 Freedom Riders, including Stokely Carmichael, were incubated on the Glen Echo picket line, and the carousel arrests were challenged in a Supreme Court case.” Tickets are ~$15.
  • ACCESS FOR ALL: Another chance to see artwork by Vik Muniz is to drop by the New Britain Museum of American Art on January 20, 2025 during the free admission day. There is also programming connected to Martin Luther King, Jr. Day including interactive drumming and Afro Beats Dancing.
  • MLK, JR COMMUNITY DAY: Free admission all day at the Wadsworth Atheneum, with programming that includes storytelling and a gospel performance. This is on January 20, 2025.
  • MINDFUL VISION PATH:  The Camp Field branch of the Hartford Public Library will give away 2025 Walking Vision Calendars and share excerpts from Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust: A History of Walking. That’s a pretty great book and I was going to suggest people borrow it from the library, but for some reason it doesn’t show up in the search as something the Hartford Public Library owns. Umm, guys? This event is January 21, 2025 at 10 AM.
  • TWO TRAINS RUNNING: You can see August Wilson’s play at Hartford Stage beginning on January 23, 2025, and if you are a Hartford Public Library cardholder, you can see it for free. This is how they describe it: “August Wilson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of Fences and The Piano Lesson, brings us the world inhabited by the staff and regulars at Memphis Lee’s diner in the Hill District of Pittsburgh in 1969. Through these complex and big-hearted characters, Wilson explores the economic and racial turbulence that marked the Civil Rights Era. Faced with declining business at his restaurant and a rapidly changing neighborhood, Memphis and those around him fight for what they believe they deserve – a fair price for the restaurant, lottery winnings, and a job.” 
  • UNSPOKEN: Another movie in the Hartford Jewish Film Festival that you can see at the JCC in West Hartford, this one will be at 6:30 PM on January 28, 2025. They describe the film: “When Noam Stein, a closeted, religious teenager finds a love letter from before the Holocaust – written to his grandfather by another man – he discovers that he might not be alone. With the help of his high-school crush, Noam sets out to find the mysterious author of the letter and uncover both his grandfather’s identity as well as his own.” Tickets are ~$15.

CULTURAL ASSETS

For ongoing free education, entertainment, public art, and resources — like 24/7 food pantries and libraries — in Hartford, check out this map. Zoom in and click on the icons for more information. This was last updated in December 2024: