Spooky Bear Provincetown 2025: Our First Year as Vendors

For more than a decade, Provincetown has been part of our queer calendar. It’s where we’ve gone to exhale, celebrate, and feel surrounded by community in a way that’s hard to replicate anywhere else.

So when we were accepted as vendors for Spooky Bear Provincetown, produced by the Northeast Ursamen, it marked a real milestone for Sticky Sweet Bears.

This year, we didn’t just show up for the parties and the costumes. We showed up as participants in a new way.

Spooky Bear is about joy, together

Spooky Bear is a Halloween weekend that brings the bear community and the broader LGBTQ+ community together for high-energy nights, casual meetups, and that special Provincetown magic that happens both in and out of costume.
It’s playful, social, and deeply communal — the kind of weekend where strangers become familiar faces fast.

From longtime Ptown tradition to first-time pop-up

Our first pop-up market experience started the way all good Ptown stories do: early setup, coffee in hand, and instant camaraderie. We met other vendors, swapped ideas, shared lessons learned, and felt that “we’re all in this together” energy before the weekend even fully kicked off.

And then the real magic hit.

People were excited to see our campy Fright Fest collection. They tried pieces on. They laughed. They told us what designs felt like them. We got to witness that moment when someone looks in the mirror and goes, “Oh… wait. This is fun. This is ME.”

Seeing Sticky Sweet Bears in the wild

The part that surprised us emotionally was what happened after the booth.

We started spotting our pieces around town — on Commercial Street, heading to parties, out at bars, just living life. That “in the wild” moment is hard to describe until you’ve felt it: something you built with your own hands and heart suddenly becomes part of someone else’s weekend, their photos, their memories.

It made Sticky Sweet Bears feel real in a whole new way.

Why this weekend mattered

Spooky Bear has been part of our story for years. But this year it became part of our work — not in a grindy way, in a proud way. It felt like stepping forward into the community that shaped us and contributing something back: style, joy, camp, and connection.

Huge respect to the Northeast Ursamen for producing a weekend that keeps bringing people together year after year.