There will be donkey cart rides, wine tasting, paintings by local artists, a display of vintage cars and farm machinery, live music, a petting zoo, face painting, mustard sampling and mustard recipes. Focal point will again be the Warner Hutton House next to the Civic Center, and docent-led orchard tours will start from there. Pat Bailey and Phylis Ballingall are heading arrangements for the city Heritage Preservation Commission.

There is a special significance to this year's event. For one thing, it will launch the city of Saratoga's 50-year anniversary celebration. (OK, the town has been here maybe a hundred years longer than that, but it wasn't until 1956 that incorporation was approved.) Another celebratory angle is the fact that Feb. 5 is the beginning of the Lunar New Year, observed by Asian cultures, and there will be special goings-on at the Community Center, open to the public without charge.

As has been previously noted in this space, I consider the Mustard Walk to be in the same civic-observance league as the Blossom Festival, which put Saratoga on the map during the first half of the last century. I feel that a community that can foster a celebration associated with its very reason for existence is truly special. It's not just someplace where people live, it's a community that has, well, call it soul.

Having now introduced the subject for the latest of several times in this space, I think it's appropriate to go back to that beginning in 1900 when the Rev. Edwin Sidney Williams, known to his friends as "Everlasting Sunshine," thought that a "thanksgiving jollification" was appropriate to celebrate the 1899 drenching ending a prolonged dry spell that hadn't done the orchards any good.

Williams, a retired Congregational minister who lived on Three Oaks Way, convinced his somewhat skeptical fellow townspeople that the little town could put on a celebration that would impress even the city folks. The main attraction, of course, would be the miles of blossoms, which visitors could enjoy from horse-drawn wagons that the locals would provide. The invitation announcements published in San Francisco newspapers did what they were intended to do.

On March 29, 1900, four carloads of visitors detrained at the South Pacific Coast Railroad station in Los Gatos. There were buggies and buckboards of Saratoga residents and brightly painted wagons from the fabled Glen Una ranch, known as the world's largest bearing prune orchard.

There were not only the orchard tours; the townspeople had arranged sports and entertainment, and many took the visitors into their homes. The Blossom Festival had been established as a success. Programs grew in their elaborateness over the years, and the venue shifted from the Village Green, next to the present Foothill Club, to Festival Glen, where the Saratogan condominium is today.

Weather, of course, was always a factor, just as it will be with the Mustard Walk. Scheduling any outdoor activity during the rainy season was almost an invitation to trouble. Probably the most outstanding example of this occurred in 1915, and is described in Florence Cunningham's Saratoga's First Hundred Years.

In that year, President Woodrow Wilson had been invited to speak at San Francisco's Panama Pacific International Exposition, and James D. Phelan was starting his term in the U.S. Senate. Because of the worsening situation in Europe, Wilson declined, but sent Vice President Thomas R. Marshall and Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt. Phelan invited Marshall and Roosevelt to Saratoga, the former to be speaker at the Blossom Festival.

The festival was rained out, however, and Marshall declined Phelan's invitation. But Roosevelt and some other dignitaries came for the weekend at Montalvo, and Roosevelt in a later interview had highly complimentary things to say about Saratoga.

Let's hope 2006 isn't another 1915 when it comes to celebrations. Win, lose or draw, though, Saratogans know how to cut the mustard.