Diwali

In my Friday post last week, I mentioned that we were going to a Diwali celebration at my in-laws house on Sunday, and Tobia mentioned in the comments that she would like to know more about the holiday.

I’ll start with the Wikipedia explanation of the holiday, and then tell you how we celebrate at my in-laws house. Click on over for more detail, I have edited it below to make it shorter and less complex.

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Diwali is the Hindu festival of lights, with variations celebrated in other Indian religions such as Jainism and Sikhism.  It is associated with the spiritual victory or triumph of Dharma over Adharma, light over darkness, good over evil, and knowledge over ignorance.  Diwali is celebrated during the Hindu lunisolar months of Ashvin (according to the amanta tradition) and K?rtika – between around mid-October and mid-November. The celebrations generally last five or six days.

Diwali is connected to various religious events, deities, and personalities, such as being the day Rama returned to his kingdom in Ayodhya with his wife Sita and his brother Lakshmana after defeating the demon king Ravana.  It is also widely associated with Lakshmi, the goddess of prosperity, and Ganesha, the god of wisdom and the remover of obstacles. Other regional traditions connect the holiday to various other gods.

During the festival, celebrants illuminate their homes, temples and workspaces with diyas (oil lamps), candles, and lanterns.  Diwali is also marked with fireworks as well as the decoration of floors with rangoli designs and other parts of the house with jhalars. Food is a major focus, with families partaking in feasts and sharing mithai.

The main day of the festival of Diwali (the day of Lakshmi Puja) is an official holiday in Fiji, Guyana, India, Malaysia, Mauritius, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago, and symbolically in the US states of Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and California.

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Ted’s parents were born and raised in Guyana, in South America, and are both of Indian descent. His mother was raised Hindu, and his father was raised Episcopalian. His parents divorced when he was young, and his mother married his step-dad, Dan. They didn’t really celebrate Diwali when Ted was growing up, because the family had chosen to raise the kids in an ‘American’ culture, which meant mainly Christian ways. Over the last maybe 30 years, Ted’s mom has held a small puja (ceremony) every year to celebrate Diwali. The photo at the top of this post is from last year’s celebration, the alter she sets up for the ceremony. During the ceremony she prays to Lakshmi to bless the family and the house. We then honor the parents (and often each other), and at the end, bring candles to every room of the house, as well as outside, to bring in light and invite good fortune from Lakshmi. Then we sit down and have a delicious meal, always vegetarian.

Unfortunately, this year our plans were thwarted by a head cold. Ted started feeling kind of crummy a few days ago, but thought it was allergies. Sunday morning he woke up feeling worse, and decided it was not a good idea to risk getting the rest of the family sick. Maya and I both woke up with that gloppy feeling in the back of our throats that mean we might be coming down with something too. So we all stayed home, had some of the food we had prepared for the party, and lit our candles throughout the house in the evening. Disappointing, but it was definitely the right thing to do.

Aside from the top photo on this post, the other pictures were taken when Ted and I went to a large Indian grocery store last weekend. I wanted to see if there was such a thing as frozen samosas stuffed with butternut squash, which seemed like it should be a thing, but alas, it was not. They had samosas stuffed with pizza filling (pepperoni and cheese I think, like an Indian pizza roll), but not squash.

As I was not raised Hindu, I am sure that I have gotten some details wrong in this post, but this is the holiday as I understand it, and it is one we always enjoy celebrating.