Not that the summer was anywhere near boring but now, now the party starts! I love, love love this time of year where our cross-cultural family celebrates almost everything from Diwali to Chinese New Year! Yes, there is much to bemoan about the commercial twists the holidays haven taken on but we continue to make new traditions and figure out ways to keep the holidays focused on our values.
The holiday festivities kickoff with one of my favorite holidays, Raksha Bhandan, where the relationship between brothers and sisters is celebrated. With Indians there are few hard and fast rules in life thus cousins and close family friends are also grouped under the category of brothers/sisters. This is a good thing as for the first ten years of life, we had no brothers to speak of (in the vicinity) however when my cousins moved here from India my Kaki introduced this holiday.
The rakhis were extremely tacky according to the refined opinion of Chubbs and I and given that the rakhis are supposed to be worn until they naturally fall off, we decided to embrace the tackiness to new levels and make our brothers wear god-awful rakhis or face the consequence of Kaki and take them off….(evil cackle). Of course, after Kaki saw what we made she was equally distraught as to what to do!
Over the years the rakhi tradition has evolved from mounds of glitter glue creations on top of Christmas ornaments to all out pre-raksha bandan rakhi-making parties. We have made edible rakhis, inflatable rakhis, current affairs rakhis and most recently this year we introduced rakhi’s that squirt!
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| Our Rahki Creations... |
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| The boys gearing up for Rakhi Time |
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Fun! Fun! Fun!
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| The tying of the rakhi's... The kids rakhi's were mounted on top of bubblegum reals. Dual purpose fun! Not sure how Huns lost his shirt in all this... |
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| Dad's reaction to the squirting rakhi's! |
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| What a Squirt! (Pun Intended) |
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| Our Crew |
So for those of you purist out there, I realize I am a bit late in posting this but that's just how we run these days! Perhaps we'll have better luck sending some of the Canadian cousins our rahki' s - any takers??!!
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