Brazilians love to party, to celebrate. Throughout the year there are a number of traditional festas of great importance, all more or less connected to the Church calendar and involving saints. Each of this festas has its very own customs, its special rituals and songs.    
    Fatima told me that many of the traditions she grew up with are changing and even disappearing. Life in Trancoso has changed dramatically due to the influx of people from all over Brazil, who now greatly influence the social life of the place. They brought their own customs along and the old ways are getting forgotten.    
    I am grateful for the help of my daughter, who still remembers the festas as they used to be in the eighties and helped me with this section.    
         
   
   
   
Rashid at "Bumba meu boi"
    
         
    The first holiday of the year used to be Bumba meu boi, on the day of Epiphany or Three King's Day. After nightfall, a man in the costume of a boi (bull), gets driven through the village by a few black-faced guys wielding sticks, accompanied by the dancing villagers singing the songs belonging to this holiday. Arriving at the house of the festeiro, the man in charge of the festivity who has to supply food and drink to the crowd, the boi lies down and gets "slaughtered", following the announcement of: "Vamos repartir o boi, pessoal" (let's divide the bull, folks). Singing amusing verses about every part of the boi and who's gonna get it, everybody has great fun.
   
    All the while people have to look out for the jaguará, who jumps out of dark hiding places, attacking them using a dead horse's head to savagely bite whoever he catches. In older times, the horse's mouth used to be filled with red hot charcoal, making the bites a lot more painful!    
         
   
   
   
procession back in the eighties
    
         
   

At the end of January, the first one of the big saint's holiday, the festa of São Sebastião, is celebrated. Those saint's days usually follow the same pattern each: On the night before the saint's day, the celebrations start with the vespera at the place of the festeiro. Festeiros are usually chosen according to their status in the village hierarchy and their ability to finance food and drink for hundreds of people. The participants of the vespera have to stay awake the whole night drinking and dancing; they are not allowed any sleep. At dawn the group, its members near collapse from excessive drinking and lack of sleep, picks up the saint's new pole and flag, which will stand in front of the church for a whole year, until the same saint's festa comes round again. Pole and flag are painted in the saint's appropriate colours, but with yearly differing patterns. The new pole gets deposited on the ground in front of the church and some of the tired folks go home for a nap.

   
    At noon everybody gathers at the festeiro's house for rice, beans and meat. Not to mention the great amounts of cachaça and batida that have to be supplied by the festeiro as well.    
         
   
   
   
Fatima as a very tired little angel
    
         
    After all bellies are filled, the procession starts, the statue of São Sebastião gets carried around the village while the saint's songs are sung and drums beaten. Back at the church, with little girls dressed as angels looking on, the pole is raised and imbedded in the ground, where it will stay for a year, until the next festival of São Sebastião. A fellow holding two sticks dances in front of the saint, who, strangely, gets cursed at and even beaten with those sticks. Onlookers get hit as well if they venture too near.    
         
    In the evening there's forró, traditional dancing and merrymaking, but attendance can be low, because many of those participants that were up since vespera the day before have no strength left for yet another night of partying.    
         
         
    About a week later, the festa of São Braz is celebrated. The festivities are about the same as for São Sebastião, just the songs and the colours of the pole and the flags differ. Fatima attended São Braz in 2002 and took some pictures (click to enlarge) :    
         
   
     
   
         
         
    On Páscoa (Easter), the village youths visit the old folks, kneeling at their doors to get a blessings and some cake. Fatima, who went along for the sweets, told me that some mean old people used to scatter grains of corn and sand at the thresholds to keep the youngsters off.    
         
    The biggest event of the year is the festa of São João. It's actually Midsummer Night, the Summer Solstice, only in Brazil it's in the middle of Winter.    
    Starting on June 22th the festivities last a whole week. The actual day of , the village's patron saint, is the 24th., the following days belonging each to a different saint. It's a whole week of processions, dancing, revelry. Drinking and eating is supplied at the houses of the respective festeiros. Fogueiras (bonfires) are lit in front of homes, people gather around the flames, telling stories and plying their instruments until the first light of dawn. Housewives sell quentão, a delicious hot drink made of ginger root, fruit juice and cachaça, that warms both body and soul.    
         
   
   
   
Rashid at São João in his first year in Brazil
   
         
    The 24th of June used to be long awaited by the village youths, who'd spent a whole months with rehearsals for the dance of the quadrilha. Wearing straw hats or scarves, the girls dressed in frilly dresses and the boys in long trousers and shirts, the adolescents gather on the village square, forming two queues, one for each gender, and the quadrilha starts.    
   

Dancing to the commands of the leader located in the middle of the formation, the lines of dancers form a circle, the circle dissolves into other patterns, couples join hands, turn round, change partners. Each step and movement follows the calls of the leader. On his call: "Olha chuva" (mind the rain) hands are raised protectively above heads, hearing "Olha pai da moça" (mind the girl's father) the couples stop touching, "Olha cobra" (mind the snake) has the dancers jump over an imaginary serpent.

    
    Towards the end of the dance, a fake priest enacts a fake "casamento" (marriage) , in the course of which the bride gets abducted by a robber. The quadrilha ends amidst great shouting and screaming.    
         
   
   
   
Fatima dancing the "quadrilha" of São João, around 1992
    
         
    Customarily, for each day of a festa people, and children especially, needed a new outfit. It took my kids a while to convince me of the importance of buying new clothes despite there actually was no need for any. We had brought many beautiful clothes from Asia, made of Indian silks and Chinese brocades, and I'd have thought Fatima could wear those for special occasions. No way, it had to be something new every time, it needn't be anything festive or expensive, just new. That was the way kids in Trancoso got their clothes, after the holiday the new outfits would be worn for school, play and work, and until the net festa often were reduced to mere tatters.    
    My friend and neighbor Zilda turned out to be a gifted tailor, happy to earn a few coins, so I usually asked her to sew the clothes for my kids. She made my dresses as well, from living in the East I was used to having my clothes made according to my own taste and style.    
         
    Christmas, the biggest holiday in most Christian countries, isn't very remarkable in Trancoso. Though with ever more foreigners living there, this might be changing as well.    
         
    Children's birthdays were commemorated with much enthusiasm and huge, lovingly decorated cakes. For my taste they were far too sweet, and often the main ingredients were just flour and water, with some chocolate added. Anyhow, to the unspoiled taste buds of the local kids those cakes sure tasted great. They had to be cut into a great amount of small chunks, to allow all the youngsters gathered around to make off happily with a tiny piece wrapped in a paper napkin. Some kids suppressed the urge to devour their handfull of bliss, and brought it home to share with their family.    
    Birthday presents mostly were rather basic as well: A cake of soap, a tube of toothpaste, or a pack of cookies.    
         
   
   
   
a typical birthday party
   
         
    One thing about those birthday parties I didn't like at all: Children often drank alcohol. Nobody seemed to mind, it was the grownups themselves who gave them cheap wine or home made batida to drink. As much as I told my own kids to stay away from those beverages, Rashid more than once returned from a friend's birthday with that telling gleam in his eyes.    
    What really got me mad though was an incident on the occasion of Radhid's own birthday at our place. I had bought some wine for the adults, and made it very clear that none of it was to be given to any kids, they were have the the soft drinks. Suddenly I saw my youngest, one year old Ahmed, teetering and, not being able to keep standing, falling to the ground. I tried to help him stand up again, in vain, he collapsed and started to cry. Something was fishy. Ahmed seemed to be near to fainting and really ill. I showed him to a neighbor, who took a good look and declared him as drunk!. I nearly went berserk. My neighbor tried to calm me down, telling me that her own little boy, of the same age as mine, had been drunk once as well.    
    Now that didn't help me at all, I was fearing for the life of my baby. The only thing we could do was massaging Ahmed's feet and putting him to sleep. Next day he was OK again. It transpired later that a young neighbor woman had given the little boy a whole cup of wine to drink.    
         
    At night there often were parties in bars, on the beach or at somebody's house. I never attended any of those, knowing very well I wouldn't like it. Dancing to loud disco music had ceased to interest me when I was sixteen and started to travel, my alcohol habit amounted to hardly more then a cold beer once in a while after shopping in the dusty heat of Porto Seguro, and I detest cocaine.    
    Even without any party, the bars bordering the village square came alive in the evening, and all night long music was played at full power. In summer season, bars and restaurants were crowded, tourists mixing with locals to drink and dance. Off season, one might walk into one of those tiny bars at three in the morning, drawn by the intensity of the blaring sound emanating from its open door, to find nobody inside but the youthfull owner sitting half asleep behind his counter.    
         
    I seldom left our property if it wasn't to buy groceries for the restaurant or something else we needed. When Grande, our first mason, who'd stopped working for us after a year to open a bakery, invited me to his birthday party I accepted though. A party attended mainly by locals, without tourists or rich dropouts from Brazil's south, was more to my liking. The natives back then weren't into cocaine yet, though, alas, this was going to change soon.    
    So I got myself ready in the late afternoon and left home to walk the few hundred meters to Grande's home. On crossing the quadrado, a totally upset Fatima caught up with me, got hold of my arm and cried: "No, Mama, you can't go." I don't know for sure why she tried to stop me, I suspect she was shocked because it was so very unusual for me to leave the house to go to a party.    
         
    Mother's Day is duly celebrated in Trancoso as well. On one such Mother's day, we mothers were called to the village school to watch our kids reciting poems about, guess what, mothers. It was real sweet.    
    On my first Mother's Day in Brazil, some women and youths were enacting "living pictures" at the village church. An improvised curtain went up and down, each time exposing a group dressed in costumes and arranged in a diferent manner symbolizing something related with motherhood. Though why they chose a young blonde with not yet any offspring of her own for the part of the mother will forever remain a mystery to me. If anything was abundant in Trancoso, it was real mothers of any type, even a few who had given birth up to twenty (!) times.    
         
    Brazilians love their children abundantly, and Children's Day is an important holiday, where the kids get spoiled and receive a few presents.