Celebrating Birthdays, Holi and being together!

You may already know that we have the Ashram full of wonderful guests and friends at the moment. It is the best time to have a lot of lovely people here because it is the season of celebration! We have been celebrating Holi, the crazy colour festival which has been going on for a week and which ends today, after its climax in the morning. We have really enjoyed Holi to its fullest! Let me describe you our celebration!

On 23rd March was the day when lots of people walked the Parikrama, the pilgrimage way around our town. With the Ashram situated at this very road, our friends and guests were excited to see that people already started throwing colours onto each other! When they stood at the gate, the passers-by included them, too, and the first cheeks turned pink and green! In the afternoon Yashendu took them all into town to a parade and the main temple to see where most people go to celebrate the colour madness! They saw how people danced, sang and played on the road and how people threw coloured powder onto each other. They obviously got their share, too, and the first taste of Holi!

Four ladies of the whole group have their birthday in March: Iris, Melanie, Sylvia and Ramona! We decided to celebrate all of their birthdays together on one day, yesterday evening. Everybody knew of the party – and we also informed them not to wear their best clothes! It was Holi after all!

So we all got together for dinner and afterwards had a huge cake for all four of them which everybody had a piece of then – and we were lots of people with all the guests and the Ashram staff. Then, our Holi party started! We had music, joyful and happy, and we started dancing until Yashendu appeared out of nowhere with sacks full of dry colour powder! He threw it, the children snapped away some and started throwing and finally everyone was dancing, throwing and playing all together! There were flowers mixed into it and we thus had a nice flower-colour-party!

The next morning we had not all recovered from the great party-hangover when the fun continued! Already before breakfast we started preparing ourselves for more Holi-madness. We rubbed oil onto our bodies and everybody with longer hair – especially the blond ladies who want to go back to work in two weeks with their original hair colour – wrapped their hair up with mud in it and a thick layer of cloth around!

After breakfast we started running into the garden where already some children of the school had gathered to play with us! And this time we did not stay with dry colour! During the night, Yashendu and the boys had prepared colour made out of flowers by boiling them for hours. So we had some of the natural yellow colour – but of course also some red, green and more! We had lots of coloured water, gave out water pistols to everyone present and had big coloured hugs with everyone!

What are the parameters to judge whether a Holi party was successful? The amount of colour in your garden? The coloured arms, legs and faces of your friends and family? The piles of different sweets that were still there yesterday and are not anymore today?

Maybe a bit of all of that and on top of it the big smiles of all the happy people who had a great time and will take the memory of a special festival with them!

Here you can look at today's and yesterday's Holi party photos