The festival of Onam falls in the month of September on the day of "Thiruvonam" star. Good guess, most of the festivals in India are driven by star and moon positions and hence the date will differ each year. This festival is celebrated to commemorate the greatness of King "Mahabali" who was an Asura king (the divine bad guys :)) and Lord Vishnu who killed this king but granted a nice wish to him. Though Mahabali was very nice to his subjects he was giving trouble to Devars (The divine good guys who are protected by the Gods). He is a strong king but very generous too. So Lord Krishna came up with a plan to destroy him. He came down to earth as "Vamana" a short Brahman and went to meet the king. King Mahabali asked Vamana what he wants and Vamana asked for 3 feet of land, deceived by the size the king granted the wish and asked him to take it. Then Vamana grew so huge and became Lord Vishnu and for the first foot he took the earth, for the second the sky and for third since there was nothing else left Mahabali understood his mistake and bowed down and asked the Lord to take him and the Lord put his foot on the King's head and destroyed him. The devars were happy, but the people of the kingdom felt miserable about losing the king and pleaded to Vishnu, the God wanting to make the people happy granted a wish that Mahabali can come to visit his people every year on that day. Hence the tradition goes as people welcome the king with the "Pookolam (Floral Rangoli) and present him with "Ona Sadhya" (variety of food served on Banana leaf) every year.
This festival is celebrated at my home too because of the Kerala ancestry, and with my "Chathurthi" experience, I decided to celebrate it here in US by making Pookolam and a smaller version of Sadhya. Since it is already fall here there were no flowers in my mini garden, I had no choice but to get flowers from a grocery store. I needed at least 3 colors so settled for a moderately priced bouquet. There were so few flowers in it that I decided to pluck out the petals inside of putting the flowers as a whole. The flowers were not enough as there were exactly 3 colors and I needed to some more to finish the design I took. So took the leaves and some part of stem too. With this all set I had to look for a suitable background. Between a glass cake base and a plain dark blue chart I went for the glass. The picture here is the final look. I sent it to a friend in India thinking it is really nice and all that and the heading if the blog is the comment I got :)), point being The Floral kolam I made did not have even 1 whole flower :(.
To give this to the intended God I needed a Vishnu picture. It was late in the night to go shopping so had to "make my own Vishnu". Found a picture after a bit of 'googling', fed it to my All-in-one printer and framed it. Picture Perfect! Decided to make the sadhya fresh in the morning and called it a night. In the morning Rice was ready as the first dish, followed by the okra theeyal (my ex-roommates recipe, but the stickiness of okra had not completely gone), in parallel channa dal in the cooker for payasam (This came out wonderful). The other item in the plan was raw banana eruseri, only that the bananas were already ripe within the two day shelf life. When the eruseri (Dad's recipe) was done it was almost close but with all the sweetness of banana (people @ work liked it for lunch though). All these dishes were loaded with coconut, coconut milk and coconut oil for nice flavor and taste.
Though it was a comedy of errors, I loved the experience.
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