Loi Krathong!

The Loi Krathong Festival is a pretty amazing festival that I got to participate in.  It takes place on the evening of the full moon of the 12gh month in the traditional Thai lunar calendar...in our wester timings, this is in November.  "Loi" means "to float" and a "krathong" is traditionally made from a section of banana tree trunk.  Modern krathongs are made of bread or styrofoam, but there are still some people who stick with the traditional banana tree trunk.  A krathong will be decorated elaborately with folded banana leaves, flowers, candles, and incense sticks.  A low value coin is sometimes included as an offering to the river spirits.

During the night of the full moon, Thais will float their frathong on a river, canal, or a pond lake.  The festival is believed to originate in an ancient practice of paying respect to the spirit of the waters.  The origins of Loi Krathong are stated to be in Sukhothai, but it is an argued point because it could be an invention from the Bangkok period.  According to the writings of H.M. King Rama IV in 1863, the originally Brahmanical festival was adaped by Buddhists in Thailand as a ceremonly to honour the original Buddha.  Apart from venerating the Buddha with light (the candle on the "raft"), the act of floating away the candle raft is symbolic of letting fo of all one's grudges, anger and defilements, so that one can start life afresh on a better foot.  People will also cut their fingernails and hair and add them to the raft as a symbol of letting fo of the bad parts of onself.  Many Thai people believe that floating a raft will bring good luck, and they do it to honor and thank the Goddess of Water, Phra Mae Khongkha (Thai: พระแม่คงคา). 

Yi Peng-Loi Krathong coincides with the Lanna festival, known as Yi Peng.  Due to a difference between the old Lanna calenter and the Thai calendar, Yi Peng is held on a full moon of the 2nd month of the Lanna calendar (confusing I know!).  A multitude of Lanna-style sky lanterns (khom loi), litterally floating lanterns, are launched into the air, where they resemble large flocks of giant fluorescent jellyfish gracefully floating by through the sky.  The festival is meant as a time for tham bun, to make merit.   People usually make khom loi from a thin fabric, such as rice paper, to which a candle or fuel cell is attached.  when the fuel cell is lit, the resulting hot air which is trapped inside the lantern , creates enough lift for the khom loi to float up in to the sky. 

So thats a little big of history on this festival. Onto my day with this festival!

This is the some Loi Krathongs that have already been deposited into the water, mine looked similar to this but the flowers were pink.  But this was the general idea of it.  You could buy one for about 100 baht, but my host mom and I decided to make them for our family. 

Sending the khom loi up into the sky.  I bought two of these for myself to send up into the air in Canada, as well as a souvineer.  They were really quite gorgeous, and the sky was speckled with lots of these twinkling lights. 

As I somewhat mentioned earlier, my host mom and I decided to make our own.  We made them out of the traditional banana tree trunk.  After cutting the piece of tree off, we brought it in and attached the banana leaves to it.  I spent a lot of time folding the banana leaves...twice.... I did it wrong the first time, and no one noticed until I had them all finished....so I had the pleasure of unfolding all of them, and then refolding them the proper way.  It really does pay to pay attention.

Here's me working on my loi krathong.  I was slower than my host mom...she had two done by the time I had one done, but she's had more experience.  As you can tell I am hard at work. :)

Here's me actually working on the thing.  After a while your thumbs start to hurt since you are pushing nails through three layers of banana leaves and into the trunk of a tree.  Eventually we found alternative ways to get the nails into the trunk.

The finished product! Well this is somewhat the finished product...at least the part that mom and I worked on.  We still had to put the candle, incense, and other things like hair, nails, and the low denomination of baht.  It was quite fun.  We did stick all of the (strange) things into it.  I didn't know the meaning behind sticking my hair on the raft, but now I do.  We accidently stuck all of my stuff on the wronge loi krathong, so we had to redo it.  So my hair had to be cut twice, and I was running low on fingernails and toenails.  Haha.

The town (Don Sak) had a slight competition on who could make the nicest loi krathong.  This was one of the submissions.  As far as I know it was just for decoration, and didn't actually get stuck in the water.  For the most part, this is all made of folded banana leaves.  Pretty eh?

Another submission for the competition, but this one uses a bit more color.  This one had a lot more flowers (mainly orchids) and the banana leaves were less intricate, but it is still just as spectacular as the one that is pictured above.

The townsfolk sending the khom loi's up into the air!  There were quite a few of them, and I even got the chance to send one up.  It was extremely funny when the people would attempt to send the khom loi's into the air, but they wouldn't have enough in them to go up so they would fly over peoples heads, and the people would duck for cover. 

It was hard to get a good picture of all of them in the air, so here is a picture of a few being off in the distance, with on being close up. 

My town didn't have that big of a celebration but there are some places that had thousands..ours maybe had a few hundred..maybe less.  Haha

Not my town, but here is an example of the beauty that the khom loi can have.  Some people in my town attached sparklers (the firework) so that was prettty .