Festive Days - Part 2

For Part 1, please read this.

A week later it was time again, but to invite little Lord Krishna. Again memories of last year lingered - we had dressed a 6 month old Diti as little Krishna. This year too, Prashanth wanted her to be dressed as Krishna, but we settled for Radha. Preparations started even earlier this time. On Monday night, I made uppu seedai, Tuesday night - some thathais and on thursday night - vella seedais. We have grand celebrations at home for Janmashtami and one of the highlights would be the drawing of little padams(footprints) like the shape of the number '8' followed by small vertical lines on top for the fingers. We usually make the rice flour kolam maavu by adding water to rice flour and make the footprints from it.

As Lord Krishna was born at midnight, it is customary to celebrate and perform the pooja inthe evening. So the kolam is done in the evenings just before the pooja. But considering the tot at home would create a mess of the kolam before it dried off, I drew the padams during her morning nap. Surprisingly the child did not mess around, instead considerd it as 'Lakshman Rekha'. She was scared of going over it and would ask us to lift her and safely deposit her on the other side. Before the pooja, I got some aval(poha) and butter for neivadya along with the goodies prepared earlier that week.

After the pooja at home, we went to the local temple and Diti was dressed as Radha in the Rajasthani suit gifted by her grandparents.(I am hurriedly feeding her some curd before we leave for the temple).We put on her a yellow bindi to match her dress and the hairclip was removed before it could even be put on her.