Happy Diwali!

So yesterday was Diwali and Marissa and I decided to celebrate. Of course, neither of us are Hindu (weird, right?) so I googled "how to celebrate diwali" to see if I could figure out how to celebrate this amazing holiday. I fortunately came across a very useful site- http://www.wikihow.com/Celebrate-Diwali. It outlined 5 convenient steps to a happy and successful Diwali celebration:

1. Before the actual Diwali day, thoroughly clean the house. Do the laundry, clean all the rooms and sort out your papers. It is like doing spring cleaning.
2. The day of, it is common to wear new clothes and jewels. If you are a woman, try to obtain a sari, traditional Indian women's dress. If you are a girl, wear an Indian blouse and top, while men should wear kurthas, the national Indian men's clothes.
3. In the evening, light small oil lamps (called "diyas") and place them around the home. Turn all the lights on and light some candles. The lamp symbolizes knowledge.
4. Perform a "Lakshmi pooja" to seek divine blessings from the Goddess of Wealth. The actual steps can be found in this particular website, .
5. Exchange gifts and sweets with close friends and family. Explode some fireworks. Play a game of cards with friends and family with a bit of gambling for fun.

So we didn't do the cleaning, because we didn't start our celebration until the night of. We didn't wear new clothes and jewels because we didn't have any. We did, however, start our celebration by lighting one of the tea lights that were still lying around from last night (see my last post). We also did not perform a "lakshmi pooja" because it sounded a little sketchy. For the last step we went to Chili's and I bought the food since Marissa didn't have any money on her at the time. That is sort of like exchanging gifts and/or sweets right? And then once we got back to my apartment I let her have a Laffy Taffy and Robyn came her a cookie. So that totally counts. All in all I would have to say it was a very successful Diwali.