Just behind the maypole, Frankie was running — frolicking, really — through a meadow of wildflowers, her fingertips grazing the waist-high “tickly grass.” On the far side of the field, a crumbling stone wall was covered in a thick carpet of moss. Just past the wall sat a thousand-year-old church with a squat little door and a steep pitch roof covered in thatch — a St. Peter’s for hobbits. Calico cows grazed on the hilltop. Birds, butterflies, the sounds of children giggling — it was one big, summertime cliché. But in this spot, at this time of year, it was all genuine.

To get to this part of Sweden from New York requires a plane, a train, a car and almost a full day of travel. Jat could generously be called a hamlet or more accurately a bunch of farms and two churches. This isn’t an area geared to tourists. Restaurants are scarce, hotels are scarcer, and unless you get lost on your drive to Stockholm and don’t turn the car around for six hours, this isn’t the kind of place you would just stumble upon. It’s the kind of place you have to seek out. Every town in Sweden has its own Midsummer party and virtually all are open to the public and to tourists — the bigger the city, the bigger the party, though the small village versions tend to be the most authentic.

Every June for nearly 20 years, my parents would pack up my three older sisters and me and we’d make the daylong journey from New York to Tingsryd, a small town on Lake Tiken that, in my memory at least, consisted of no more than an ice cream stand, a toy store and a church. Even as a child, I knew Smaland was special in a particular way. The region and our home, Dianella (in a place like this, homes have names), feature all the trappings of a fairy tale: Birch forests that go on forever. Idyllic meadows covered in Queen Anne’s lace and pink lupines. Bottomless black lakes. Wandering families of elk. Children are taught to believe that there are tomten, or gnomes, lurking in the forests. We used to forage for blueberries or, after it rained, chanterelle mushrooms. I even had an aunt who, right out of central casting, lived in a little red cottage with no electricity in the middle of the forest. She seemed to be perpetually baking kanelbullar (cinnamon rolls) and kringlor (small, crunchy doughnuts) for my sisters and me.

The maypole was the concern of the menfolk, led by Uncle Stig, who would first unload a tractor full of foliage. They would nail birch logs together to create a 15-foot cross, cover it with leafy vines and attach two rings of flowers on either side. My sisters and I would plant ourselves in the field — the same field where Frankie was playing — and we would braid our bundles of wildflowers into crowns or slip them into our pigtails. (Our older cousins, presumably, tucked seven Midsummer flowers under their pillows. According to superstition, that night they would dream about their future husbands.) Then we’d go home, put on our matching blue floral pinafores and rush to greet the guests.

By 3 p.m., the festivities in Jat were in full swing. Yellow and blue bunting — the colors of the Swedish flag, symbolizing the sky and the sun, I was told as a child — flapped in the breeze. Most people arrive at Midsummer in garden party clothes. But there are always a few die-hards — the men and women (including my aunts Ulla and Kerstin) who wear the traditional dress. In Smaland, that means varendsdrakt: white lace blouses, embroidered vests, ankle-skimming skirts, crimson sashes and white hats for the women; blue vests and elk-skin pants for the men. These costumes are always handmade, their design dates back many centuries, and each province of Sweden has its own variation. There is nothing, in other words, more traditionally Swedish than folkdrekten, or folk costumes, on Midsummer. But if you didn’t know better, you could be forgiven for thinking a group of Russian nesting dolls had come to life.

Everyone shows up to Midsummer — and enthusiastically. Even the teenagers with their slouched shoulders and asymmetrical haircuts who you’d expect to be sullen or have their heads buried in their smartphones, were holding hands, skipping around the maypole and singing about sleeping bears and jumping frogs without so much as an eye roll. The older citizens of Jat clapped along from wooden chairs on the sidelines. Young mothers swayed with sleeping babies clasped on a shoulder. But really, Midsummer is a holiday made for little girls. Dripping ice cream cones, running races, crowns of flowers — Frankie, who doesn’t speak a word of Swedish, was having all of it.

The Johansson clan — my kinfolk — represented well that day. Sure, cousin Eva had gone gray, Aunt Kerstin moved a little more slowly, and my little cousin Emma had babies of her own, but basically nothing had changed that much since the last time we all danced around a maypole together two decades ago.