Growing up, Diwali was and still is one of my favorite festivals to celebrate. Diwali is a five-day festival, and it is celebrated with music, worshipping the goddess Lakshmi, fireworks, and distributing traditional sweets. It brings happiness, prosperity, and a new beginning. It's also known as New Year in some religions. We start preparing for it one month in advance. Every year, my mom and I go to different stores to buy decorations for the house and the family puja where prayers of devotion are offered to Lakshmi. One of my favorite chores to do is decorating the house. I’ve always been the one who cleans, lights candles, puts up the lights, and draws Rangoli at the entrance of my house and the temple. My sister and I would get to each side of the door and were left alone by our parents with different colored powders. One year we started drawing in the morning at 10 am and weren’t done until evening at 7 pm. We spent all day trying to perfect the drawing only for them to be wiped off by the wind. While the preparations were always exhausting and the puja days were extremely long, the beautiful lighting and fireworks made up for it at the end of the night. The lights are my favorite sighting. The celebration of Diwali always brought everyone in my family together and my cousins and I would always do fireworks together while the parents stood nearby. To me, Diwali is more than just a traditional Asian holiday, but a time of bonding, family, and love.
- Dhvani Parikh