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By happy coincidence (at least we prefer to see it as happy), Halloween and Diwali, the “festival of lights,” coincide this evening. Well, the full festival — also called Deepwali — lasts five days and began Oct. 29, but this is generally considered the peak of the celebration.
As the Hindustan Times points out, the festival dates are set by the Hindu lunar calendar to fall on the darkest night of the year. Each day marks a different part of the religion, but Day 3 (today, Diwali) has a particularly universal description. As per the Times, it “commemorates the victory of good over evil,” and is marked in homes by decorations with earthen lamps, stunning arrays of flowers called ragnoli, and lights.
No surprise then that the Hindu festival has been adopted with variations by other Indian religions. The commemoration can also include exchanging gifts and sweet treats, lavish feasts, fireworks and even donning a new outfit. Sound familiar? There is no reason to believe Diwali and the west’s winter season of Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Day are connected by anything other than the most basic human instinct: Colorful decorations, feasts and lots of artificial illumination are common responses to the rapidly darkening days of winter throughout the world.
There’s another reason for the lights, according to National Geographic: They are supposed to help the Hindu goddess of wealth, Lakshmi, find her way into peoples’ homes.
Which makes it fairly compatible with Halloween, we dare say. Sure, they aren’t dressing as ghosts and demons (or princesses and superheroes), but lest we forget, that tradition started as a way to cope with the presumed annual arrival of otherworldly spirits. Celts believed that while these apparitions could cause trouble and damage crops, they also made it easier for their priests (Druids) to make predictions — preferably prognostications that would help avoid a bad fate, or assure a successful growing season once weather warmed again.
But there’s another, more subtle reason to note the synchronicity of the holidays today: It’s an excellent reminder of how much we gain through the diversity of our citizens, locally and nationally. This was put on fine, and charming, display Wednesday morning when students from families of Indian tradition arranged programs for several classes in the Wyoming Seminary Lower School.
Older students did presentations explaining the basics of the feast, then helped the youngsters engage in some artsy entertainment related to what they just heard. Kindergarten students, for example, grabbed boxes of crayons and colored in pictures of items affiliated with Diwali — a bit of fun that hid a little counting lesson as well.
Second grade students asked questions about the festival, including whether it was comparable to the Christian notion of God and Satan at war, as well as a more down-to-earth query: Did they have pencil sharpeners the thousands of years ago when some events Diwali commemorates occurred? (Surely they had sharpening implements, but the device we usually think of was devised by Parisian mathematician Bernard Lassimone in 1828).
Then they colored in pictures of earthen pots used as lamps, and folded construction paper into a 3-D representation, complete with a yellow paper “flame.”
It was a reminder of how we share many universal concepts across national and ethnic boundaries and of how readily many children enjoy learning about different traditions. As this harshly heated election season rushes to Tuesday’s election, that’s a lesson we adults can really use.