By late morning the ballroom has found its volume. Eighty booths deep, a guitar going somewhere near the windows, and a steady current of people moving between a free hearing screening, a lawyer giving twenty honest minutes, and a table where someone is about to lose a game of Scrabble to a nationally ranked player. Nobody here is being talked down to. That is the whole trick of the Over 50 Fair, and on Sunday, September 27, it runs for the seventeenth time. Creations Magazine is proud to be among this year's sponsors, which means we get to tell you two things at once: why to come, and why you might want a table of your own.

Not the Fair You Are Picturing

Say the words senior fair and most people imagine a folding table of pamphlets in a municipal basement. Founder Barbara Kaplan has spent seventeen years building the opposite of that, and she is blunt about the distinction. Her measure of a good day is not how many brochures leave the building but whether guests actually learned something, talked to someone, and walked out knowing about a business or an organization they had no idea existed that morning.

The motto has not changed since the beginning: overflowing with opportunities for age 50 and up. In practice that means the floor is genuinely mixed. Health and wellness sit near travel, financial strategy near continuing education, home services near the kind of small local nonprofit that never gets a marketing budget. Kaplan, who lives in East Hills, produces the fair through Specialty Connections along with the All Kids Fair each spring, and the family resemblance shows: both events are built on the assumption that people come to do something, not to be handed a tote bag.

Long Island seems to agree. The Over 50 Fair has been voted Best of Nassau County in the Best Annual Event or Festival category for ten consecutive years.

Four women standing behind a table draped in red at the Over 50 Fair, with roses, a candle and a banner of Best of Long Island awards behind them
Eighty-odd tables like this one fill the ballroom. MTN Matchmaking, a returning exhibitor, hosts this year's singles lounge.

Twenty Classes, and One of Them Is About Scrabble

More than twenty classes run through the day, included with admission. A few worth building your schedule around:

Scrabble Strategies, taught by Samuel Kaplan, a top-50 rated NASPA expert player. Even people who have played their whole lives tend to leave this one rearranging their assumptions about the board. He also sets up at his own booth afterward and will take on any challenger who fancies their chances.

Aging Strong & Living Stronger, with Dr. Michael Posner of Huntington Chiropractic Wellness, on keeping the body capable rather than merely intact.

Finding your (Singing) Voice, with The Harbormen Chorus, for everyone who has quietly believed since third grade that they cannot sing.

How to Improve Your Dating, Love, and Sex Life After 50, with Maureen Tara Nelson of MTN Matchmaking Inc. This one returns by demand and fills up, which tells you something about what people actually want to talk about and how few places there are to do it.

Music, Screenings, and a Lounge for the Unattached

An acoustic showcase runs through the day, presented by The Booking Ace. This year brings Mor Koren Schwartz, a newcomer with real range and a habit of moving between four languages mid-set, alongside the returning Gotcha Covered Duo of David Lamm and Danielle Gatto, playing soft and classic rock from the sixties through the two thousands.

Two musicians performing at the Over 50 Fair, a man playing acoustic guitar and a woman singing into a microphone, beside a window full of daylight
The acoustic showcase at a recent fair. It runs through the day, and it is included with admission.

ClearSound Hearing Centers is offering hearing screenings on site, which is the sort of thing people put off for a decade and then do in fifteen minutes because it happens to be right there. MTN Matchmaking Inc. hosts a singles lounge, a genuinely useful piece of design: a place to sit down, catch your breath, and talk to someone without the whole encounter having to mean anything yet.

And to class the place up, several Ms. New York Senior America titleholders will be on the floor: Joan Caliendo, the 2024 titleholder, Mae Caime from 2023, and CJ Marie from 2015.

Nine women posed on a dance floor, several in white fringed dresses with sashes, one in a red gown wearing a crown
Titleholders and performers at a recent Over 50 Fair. The day has a floor show as well as a trade floor.

Bring Your Questions, They Are Free to Ask

Several kinds of consultation are available at no cost. Omni Financial Research is taking financial questions. Meltzer, Lippe, Goldstein & Breitstone LLP is on hand for legal ones. True Mind Wellness is offering therapeutic consultations, and Ethical Healing Practices is giving free energy healings. If you have been carrying a question around for a year because you did not know who to ask or did not want to start a billable clock, this is a low-stakes place to put it down.

The Raffle That Feeds Angela's House

This year the fair supports Angela's House, a Long Island 501(c)(3) that helps families caring for children who are medically fragile, chronically ill, or living with a life-threatening illness. It is hard, unglamorous, deeply local work. Bring non-perishable food, a new toy, or a donation, and you earn raffle tickets toward the prize table. You can do something quietly good on your way in and still walk out with a prize, which is a fair trade in anyone's book.

If You Are Going

Sunday, September 27, 2026 | 10:00 AM to 4:30 PM | Hilton Long Island/Huntington, 598 Broadhollow Road, Melville, NY

Admission is $7 in advance and $10 at the door, and it covers everything: all classes, the full exhibit floor, the singles lounge, the music, and the hearing screenings. Veterans with ID get in free. Buying ahead also earns you a door prize raffle ticket, handed to you when you arrive.

Advance tickets: Over 50 Fair advance admission

Exhibiting: What a Table Actually Costs

Here is the part worth reading twice if you run a business that serves this audience. The people walking this floor are not browsing by accident. They paid to be there, they came with questions, and they are in the decision-making years for health services, financial planning, home modification, travel, senior living, legal work, and a dozen other categories where one good conversation can be worth a year of advertising.

Space is sold by size and position, and the range is wider than most people expect. Half of a six-foot table starts at $325. Six by six spaces run from roughly $525 to $700 depending on placement and whether you want a wall or a corner. A ten by ten wall space in the ballroom is $975, a large trapezoidal spot in the Gateway is $1,150, and the twenty by ten supersized wall tops the list at $1,750.

There are also bundled packages that fold a booth together with advertising, class time, or bag inserts, running from about $575 at the small end to $2,700 for the largest, each discounted against the value of its parts. Unmanned packages exist for businesses that want presence without staffing a table all day.

Beyond the booth: teaching a class runs $250 to $350, private room rentals are $500 to $900 depending on half or full day, an insert in the event bag is $325, and program book advertising runs from $150 for a half page in black and white up to $1,050 for the full-page color back cover. A small item on the information table costs as little as $25.

Booths, packages and the floor map: Over 50 Fair business opportunities

Sponsoring

Sponsorship is the move if you want your name attached to the day rather than confined to one table. The Event Bag Sponsor at $1,200 puts your brand in the hands of every attendee for the entire day and then again on their kitchen counter for a month. The Gateway Main Sponsor at $1,000 and the Gateway Sponsor at $700 cover the entrance area everyone passes through twice. The Website Sponsor at $500 is the low-cost way in, and it works year-round rather than for six and a half hours.

Whichever tier fits, the reason to do it is the same reason Creations did: this is a room full of the people you are trying to reach, assembled once a year, in a good mood, in one building.

This Year's Sponsors

The seventeenth Over 50 Fair is made possible by Meltzer, Lippe, Goldstein & Breitstone LLP, AARP Long Island, East Neck and Carillon Nursing and Rehabilitation Centers, the Family Service League Ombudsman Program, FleckTech Solutions, Pinnie Health, the Friends of the Retired and Senior Volunteer Program of Suffolk, Schneps Long Island, Creations Magazine, The Garden City News, Herald Community Newspapers, 106.1 BLI and 102.3 WBAB, and 516Ads.com and 631Ads.com.

Getting In Touch

Booths and sponsorships are handled directly by Barbara Kaplan, and the good spots go first. Reach her at 516-621-1446 or [email protected], or start at Over50Fair.com.

If your business serves families rather than adults over 50, the same team produces the All Kids Fair, and the sixteenth returns to the same Hilton on Sunday, April 11, 2027.

Seventeen years is a long time for a one-day event to keep growing, and the reason is not complicated. Nobody is condescended to, everything is included in the ticket, and the room is arranged so that people meet each other. Come for the Scrabble. Stay for whatever you find three booths down.