Keeping Up With Holidays

Last updated on: April 30, 2015 at 6:06 am by Ambaa Choate

Keeping Up With Holidays 2015-04-30T06:06:59-04:00 Ambaa Choate

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In America, where we are one of the smallest faith minorities, it can be very challenging to keep on top of when festivals and holidays are.

When you live in a place where your faith is a majorly practiced one, then society helps to remind you of stuff coming up. I know when Easter is coming because the stores suddenly have plastic baskets and egg coloring kits. I know when Passover is coming because there are displays of matzo products. TV commercials have holiday focuses around Christmas or Thanksgiving. Magazines have advice for staying trim during family holiday meals. People around you are talking about their holiday plans.

For our holidays there is none of that. You have to take a lot of initiative yourself in order to celebrate our festivals. You have to notice when they are coming up and find a place to celebrate them. If you’re strongly connected to a faith community than that’s easier. For me the temple in my area is so huge and serves such a large region that I don’t have a very personal connection there. I depend on their emails to tell me what’s going on and it’s easy to miss an email in the flood of junk mail. When I’m going to my bhajan group regularly that helps. But since I got my job at a grocery store I’ve had to miss many Saturdays for work.

I have chosen key holidays that are most important to me that I try hard not to miss: Diwali, Holi, Karwa Chauth, Krishna Janmashtami, Ganesh Chaturthi, and Maha Shivratri. But even so I do sometimes miss them. Time flies by so fast that sometimes by the time I remember to notice a holiday is already speeding by.

I wish I had a solution to this but if I let a holiday go by without acknowledging it that’s probably because I was too busy to be tuned into my usual sources of information!

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