Tihar

Move over Chanukkah! There is a better festival of lights! The Nepali festival Tihar:

Tihar, the festival of lights is one of the most dazzling of all Hindu festivals. In this festival we worship Goddess Laxmi, the Goddess of wealth. During the festival all the houses in the city and villages are decorated with lit oil lamps. Thus during the night the entire village or city looks like a sparkling diamond. This festival is celebrated in five days starting from the thirteenth day of the waning moon in October. We also refer to tihar as 'Panchak Yama' which literally means 'the five days of the underworld lord'. We also worship 'yamaraj' in different forms in these five days. In other words this festival is meant for life and prosperity.

Goddess of wealth? Being Nepal(one of the poorest countries in the world) she must not be a very good goddess. Certainly not very generous. Also "Underworld Lord" must be a bad translation. I don't think that they worship of the movie Underworld.

(As an aside, this is how Underworld is described:

Underworld reimagines Vampires as a secretive clan of modern, aristocratic sophisticates whose mortal enemies are the Lycans (werewolves), a shrewd gang of street thugs who prowl the city's underbelly. The balance of power is upset when a beautiful young Vampire and a newly made Lycan (Vampires and Lycans being deadly rivals for centuries) fall in love.

It's Dracula meets Romeo and Juliet meets West Side Story meets Dracula 2000. So awesome.)

Back to Tihar. The following passage enlightened me as to the true nature of a certain Nepali friend of mine:

If you belong to the Newar community, you perform 'Mha puja' which literally means worshipping yourself. The newar community people are worshipping life by doing puja on themselves. On this very day the newar New Year also starts. Nepal has many minor community calendars and newar calendar is one of them but the nation follows the Bikram Sambat calendar.

It all makes so much sense now. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need go to puja myself.