Diwali, Festival of Lights!

Now many people living in South Asia right now are probably sitting in their rooms, as I am, way past their bed time, just hoping and praying for the noise to stop so they can go to sleep. Yes, my friends it is Diwali. Think Christmas, 4th of July and Halloween combined into one night!!! The afternoon went like ... we decided we should make sweets for our neighbors, thinking it would be nicer than just buying sweets for them. We relised that we didn't have the major ingredient, cocoa, so we decided to walk to our little market and buy some regular chocolate. The chocolate was bought and so were some sparklers, and the baking extravaganza began. After the chocolate, peanut butter no bake cookies were done, however, we realised that we had indeed "messed them up". April's quote summed it up quite nicely..."Beki, the ghetto called and they want their cookies back!" Yes indeed there were many substitutions made that consequently caused the cookies to taste more like sweet oatmeal blobs. We decided it didn't matter, since our neighbors would give us sweets which taste like a sugar ball soaked in sugar. We're not huge fans of the sweets here. Well I shouldn't say that, there are some sweets we really like, but there are others that I just don't enjoy a) because they taste like a deep fried sugarball, coated in sugar syrup, and b) because they usually give me a really bad headache the day after. Today was no exception. We ventured on the roof to check out some of the lights and lit some crackers, played with our sparklers and oh and ahhed over the other fireworks and lights around town! It was BEAutiful! We then quickly went downstairs to take our plates of treats to our neighbors. We dropped them off, feeling mighty proud that we were so good at this whole hospitality thing, when to our horror all of our plates came back with MORE sweets on them.
The plates and boxes kept coming, until we have 2 boxes and 4 plates of sweets. Remember I can't eat a lot of sweets because they make me sick, and April doesn't want to eat that many!!! We tried ALL of the sweets to make sure we ate the ones we liked, however, after you take a small bite out of 30 different sweets you're looking at a really bad headache regardless of your resilience to sugar. Diwali is celebrated mainly to Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth. I have read that for many Hindus the fiscal year starts the day after Diwali. People will draw paths and light them with candles, showing Lakshmi where to enter and bless the house. I don't know all the details, and each person celebrates the holiday differently, however, one thing I picked up was that most people are big on this holiday because it's when Lakshmi comes and blesses people financially! For a people who are cheaper than I am, and always trying to better their financial situation- this is an important festival to celebrate- it's also a lot of fun. All the lights kind of reminded me of Christmas! If you would like to read more about this Hindu holiday you can go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diwali