Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Our Diwali story

"Gabriella is not Indian", says Sophia on the eve of Diwali. "So she has no henna"

"Well. mummy is Indian, Daddy is Romanian, and that makes you children of the world", I said. "So you can celebrate anything you want"

So here's how we celebrated Diwali

On the eve of Diwali, we explored Henna. Instead of me putting henna on the girls, we made it more fun by tracing the children's hands onto paper. They designed their own henna art.

This was Anjali's

 And Sophia's
 And it got transformed into Henna designs
 Here is Sophia's seaweed on rocks, clouds and birds
 We colored rice
 And used it for our rangoli
 Here the girls are working on the rangoli
 The rice was colored using food coloring. Nothing fancy
 But I love  how the rice came up in shades, there are atleast five shades of blue in there
 And we put out homemade diyas on the flower to become additional leaves
 On Diwali morning, the girls were up bright and early. Before sleeping, we talked about the importance of waking up at Dawn and how it symbolizes new light and the destruction of evil. So when I woke the girls at six, they jumped out of bed, put oil on their hair, and took a bath (even Sophia)

 We prayed at the altar, put on new clothes and ate our sweets

Then it was sparkler time. Its still dark in the playground

 But it was fast getting light, evena s Sophia warmed up to the idea of sparklers

 Girl power. We danced Chammak Challo on the tree
 Doesn't the rangoli look beautiful in the front door
 The Diwali temple trip. Owing to the fact that the girls were up early, we were at the temple early and didnt have to deal with the crowds. As we were returning, the queues were extremely long
 We went to patti's house where all of us napped before lunch, had a nice lunch, played and came back for the evening sparkler party that we have at the playground.

We took a detour for this
 As even princesses need to play in the mud - even Belle

2 comments:

  1. I love the girls' henna art! What a great way for them to get artistically involved!

    ReplyDelete

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