Festa Junina

Festa Junina Season is around the corner and with this fun event coming up I’m already excited to start decorating my home and celebrating it.

Last year we dedicated quite a bit of time preparing our Festa Junina. The whole process was nostalgic and fun, as we remembered when we were kiddos celebrating with our families and how nice it was to spend time with our grandparents and parents preparing food and decorations.

You can learn more about Festa Junina in my previous post Festa Junina: a traditional Brazilian celebration.

As for the party, I set a thematic decor with lots of sunflowers, colorful pennant flags, woven hats, woven baskets and other woven items to bring some rustic and countryside vibes because São João is all about that. And of course, I used a floral tablecloth: a plaid or a floral tablecloth is a must in every Festa Junina.

The centerpiece of the food station was the corn cake (grandma’s recipe). Then I had other traditional food, mostly made from corn (yuuuummm), completing the decor. I displayed the food menu and also wrote the name in front of each food station.

Cachaça is a must in every Festa Junina. You’ll find different flavors, barrel aged or not, bottle aged with roots and spices, etc. We decided to make our favorite homemade cachaça drinks: bottled aged cachaça with spices, cupuaçu cachaça and coffee flavored cachaça (not pictured). We then tagged the shot glasses with the guest names for re-use. It’s a way to avoid plastic and/or disposables.

We put on a junina playlist with forró and later on we had live music played by @abmarbarros and our friend Luiz, with everyone else as special guests 🙂

**Accordion the main instrument for the traditional Festa Junina music**

***Triangle Percussion is also an essential Instrument***

We also had bingo! Bingo takes me back: I remember my grandma buying lots of cards at the festa junina and me helping her to mark the cards. And as a ward I made a coffee cachaça.

And to add to the vibes, we wore traditional clothes with different plaid patterns. Abmar and I dressed up as groom and bride, we had a friend dressed up as a priest to marry us 🙂 “The wedding” before the quadrilha junina is a must-have tradition.