We are less than two months away from the return of the Moonlight Bazaar to uptown Saint John.

Organizers are busy preparing for the one-day street festival, which is marking its sixth year this August.

“The whole team is super excited,” Lauchlan Ough, co-founder of Moonlight Bazaar, said in an interview last week.

“This is a project that takes eight to nine months to bring to life, so any time we get to this point of officially launching our brand, concept and theme is always exciting.”

Moonlight Bazaar is a free street festival that celebrates creativity and brings the community together in uptown Saint John.

Ough said there will be food, music, pop-up performances and vendors under the light of a seven-metre inflatable moon and Mars.

“It’s like borrowing all these things from music festivals and farmers’ markets and combining them into one,” he said.

The theme for the 2023 iteration of the festival is Moonlight Encounters of the Sixth Kind.

Ough said they like to shake things up each year to give festivalgoers a new experience.

“We wanted to do something where the theme could tie into some really good audience participation,” he said.

More than 40,000 people came out last year and Ough is hoping to see even more this year.

This year’s event will also feature an expanded footprint, offering more space for the festivities to take place.

“We do Canterbury Street, Grannan Lane, some of Princess Street, and now we’re going even further down Prince William Street toward King and we’ll be adding an additional bar and more vendors down that way,” said Ough.

“From our very humble beginnings on Grannan Lane, we’ve expanded to incorporate pretty much all of the central part of the uptown.”

Ough said they also have a number of dedicated sponsors who help make this event a reality every year, including the presenting sponsor Commercial Properties.

This year’s Moonlight Bazaar takes place on Saturday, Aug. 26, from 4 p.m. to 12:30 a.m.