Loy Krathong
November 6, 2014
Loy Krathong is a Thai tradition celebrated on the full moon
of the twelfth lunar month. A traditional krathong is made from a chunk of
banana stalk decorated with leaves, flowers, candles, and joss sticks. The
krathong may be modest in size, like a flower arrangement for a table, or very
large. The tradition is to float (= loy) the krathong in the river by
moonlight; while doing so, people pray, ask the river’s forgiveness for using
and/or polluting her, make a wish for good luck, and release all their negative
thoughts with the krathong.
Last year, I didn’t float a krathong myself. I attended two
Loy Krathong celebration parades and wrote about them in the post titled “We
keep our traditions alive.”
This year, my kind colleague Yu Pin, whom you can see in
pictures in previous posts, made a beautiful krathong for me. Here are two pictures of it on the porch of my
host family’s home. If you are on Facebook, you’ve seen most of these pictures
already.
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The krathong is made almost entirely of leaves rolled into
shape and stuck into a banana stem. The
green “flowers” are made by splitting a leaf down the middle, folding part of
the first half over several times to make the center, then folding, turning,
and wrapping the other half of the leaf over and over to make the bud or
blossom. – Is that as clear as mud? It wasn’t too clear to me, although Yu Pin
tried to teach me how to do it. The flower I made was so ungainly that it
seemed best to leave this art to others.
I went with my host sister, her mother, and a couple of
their friends to the nearby town of Tha Ruea to float krathong in the river. In
the picture, I’m standing between my host sister and her mother.
The park near the river was decorated with lights as for a
carnival. There were musicians and other performers and many vendors selling
snacks, balloons, and other festive items.
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And here I am putting my krathong into the river.
I have mixed feelings about the loy krathong festival.
Obviously it’s a tradition that Thai people hold dear, it’s beautiful to watch,
and it gives visitors to Thailand an opportunity to participate
rather than just watch. On the down side, all those krathong do tend to clog up
the river, which seems to contradict the act of begging the river’s forgiveness
for exploiting and polluting her. The Bangkok Post reported (November 7, 2014)
that clean-up crews counted more than 980,000 krathong floats in Bangkok waterways,
up 13.5% from last year. Of these, 885,995 (90.22%) were made from natural
materials (leaves, flowers, and banana stems), compared with 88% made of
natural materials last year. This presumably reflects a growing sense of
environmental responsibility, at least in Bangkok. It definitely means less
styrofoam to dispose of than in years past. Still, the person-power needed to
pick up the krathong, count them (!), and haul them away is significant. Clearly it can be a
challenge to bring tradition into balance with concern for the environment.
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Disclaimer: The content of this blog is mine personally. The opinions expressed do not reflect the views of the Peace Corps or its employees, the United
States government or its agencies, or anyone but me.
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