The Loy Krathong-feast was held in Sundsvall yesterday. It is a feast for Thai people when they celebrate and thank the Water Goddess. People go down to the sea and put afloat a little boat made of banana leaves. Inside there is a little lighted candle. I wonder what kind of leaves they used here in Sundsvall, not many left on the trees now.

 

Loy means to float and krathong is the little boat my morning paper says.

 

This feast is held in the 12th month according to the moon calendar, when there is a full moon. That is interesting, because I believe their feast then must be extremely old. Modern (i.e. from ca 3.000 BC and onwards) thinking would instead locate this kind of feast to new moon, when it is completely dark. Then a candle is needed. Modern thinking is rational and not based on emotions.

 

In Sweden we have such a modern feast at Lucia (13th of December) with a kind of beauty queen with lighted candles in her hair. This custom is old too, but not extremely so. Because when they established this feast at the 13th of December it must have been winter solstice, and the precession of the equinoxes has since moved this solstice until 21th of December. So it is just to calculate how many hundreds of years that corresponds to.