Hi there,

We are building a haunted house in our basement. My kids have been building it for weeks. Cardboard, animatronics, a great deal of tape, and a plan for levels of scariness based on who’s going through it. It’s for everyone who comes to our Halloween party, and it has been the single most important project in this house since the start of October.

Halloween is Saturday. Diwali is the Saturday after.

Three weeks, two festivals, one house and if I'm honest about which one has had more attention, it's the one I grew up with.

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Partly it's us. My husband and I actually met on Halloween, a long time ago now, so it's always been a holiday we are fond of.

Our neighbourhood does trick-or-treating properly, and for the last couple of years we've thrown a party as well. The kids get completely into it, and partly it's everything around us. Halloween has been in every shop since the first week of September. 

We've also had some luck this year. A couple of years ago Halloween and Diwali landed on the same day and it was genuinely chaotic. Scary costumes and Indian clothes in the same afternoon, two sets of people expecting you. This year they're a week apart, which is the first thing on my list of small mercies.

Honestly, it’s not a deep reason but mostly for logistics.

It isn't the same date every year, so you can't build a habit around it. It isn't always a day off school. We live somewhere with a big Indian community, so there are plenty of Diwali parties but we tend to go to them rather than host, and the puja (prayers) happens at my in-laws'.

So Diwali arrives as something we attend. Halloween arrives as something we make.

But, I don't want my kids growing up with Halloween as the real one and Diwali as the thing we also did. So we try to do all of it, at different volumes, and some years that works better than others.

When the boys were younger I always expected the pushback would be social. That they'd be embarrassed, or that nobody at school would understand. But that’s not the case at all. 

There are lots of Indian kids in their school and Diwali is way more known than when I grew up in the US in the 80s and 90s.

Though I'll say that Indian boys resist the outfits in a way that seems close to universal, and my line on it is the same every year: you wear this four times a year, it won't kill you, put it on.

The place where the resistance actually sits is the puja (prayers).

The puja at my in-laws' is very traditional, and nothing is translated. So my kids sit there for a long stretch of time with no idea what is being said, what any of it means, or why they're doing it. A thirteen-year-old sitting through two hours of something unexplained is not going to come away full of warmth about his heritage.

So I started doing a version at home. Not as a replacement but before it, much shorter, in English, where I actually tell them what we're celebrating and why. That one change has done more than anything else I've tried.

Here's the part I'd most want to tell you, because I had it backwards for years.

I assumed my children were missing out. That I'd had a childhood full of tradition and they were getting a diluted version of it, squeezed in between baseball and tennis and American school holidays.

It's the opposite. It's not even close.

I grew up in the US, in a town without many Indians in it. There was no community Diwali celebration. Nothing in the shops. The nearest Indian grocery was a two-hour drive, so even getting the ingredients was a project. Nobody outside our own family knew what Diwali was, you didn't explain it to your friends, because where would you start?

What I had was my parents, at home, doing their best to show us something on one day of the year and then it was over and school was normal again.

My kids have a whole community. They have Diwali parties with other families. They have grandparents who do the proper thing properly. They have friends who celebrate it too, and friends who don't but know roughly what it is and will ask about the food and fireworks.

There are parts of this country now where you can watch Hindi and Telugu films at the local theater and live an almost entirely Indian life if you want to. That was unimaginable where I grew up.

So when I catch myself worrying that they're losing it, they're not. They're getting considerably more of it than I ever did. I'm the one who had the thin version.

This isn't only an Indian problem, and it isn't only a Diwali problem. It's any house where one tradition is louder than the other. A different faith on each side, a grandparent's language nobody else speaks, a country somebody left.

I was doing it wrong for years, so I'll just tell you what I was doing.

I was saying: we're going, everyone's going, that's what we're doing, get in the car.

That’s precisely when you get resistance because from their side they're being moved around for no stated reason. They don't understand it, so they can't value it, so of course they dig in.

Explaining the why doesn't make it disappear. I want to be clear about that, because they're a tween and a teen and at this point I expect resistance to approximately everything, including dinner. But it drops. Noticeably.

Then there's the other half, which I also believe: sometimes you just have to do hard things. Not everything in life is going to be enjoyable, and you're coming anyway, because that's what this family is doing today. That's allowed to be the answer.

I am sure about this, mostly because I was that kid.

I took a few Hindi classes growing up and I hated it. Boring, pointless, and I was completely certain I would never use it. I did fine. I just resented every minute.

I now use it constantly. In our own community, when I travel, whenever something needs translating. I'm not fluent but I can get myself around, and I'm genuinely grateful for it.

That's the whole argument for making them go. They are not going to thank you this year. They may well be annoyed with you for the next five. But then at some point, as an adult, they'll notice they have something and they won't remember being made to get it.

I'm not going to pretend we've got this balanced. Halloween is winning in this house and there's a haunted house and dead mummies in my basement to prove it.

But I've stopped treating that as a failure. They're getting more than I got. They have a community I didn't have, grandparents who do it properly, and a mother who now explains things instead of just driving them places.

In thirty years, when one of them is standing in their own kitchen trying to remember how any of it goes, they'll have more to work from than I did.

That'll do.

See you next week,
Lakshmi 💛