Durga Puja Gift Ideas

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Durga Puja gift ideas For most of Durga Puja nobody is buying anybody a gift. The five days from Shashthi to Dashami belong to the pandal: the bodhon that opens it, the anjali on Ashtami with both hands full of flowers, the dhak, and the walking from pandal to pandal until two in the morning. The gifting comes at the end. On Bijoya Dashami, once the pratima has gone to the water, the visiting starts. You go to the elders in the family, you pranam, they feed you something sweet, and you do not turn up empty handed. In many families that round of visits runs on for a fortnight past Dashami. That is the occasion worth buying for, and it is the part every gifting listicle skips. Sweets are what gets carried on an ordinary visit, and for an ordinary visit sweets are the correct answer. We do not make them, and we do not make the pratima either, since that is unfired clay on a straw and bamboo frame, built for one season and returned to the river. What is worth buying here is the other thing people give at Bijoya: something for the thakur ghor that is still in the house long after the naru is finished. Start from who you are visiting Almost everybody arriving here is searching for a person rather than an object. Parents and in-laws, wife, husband, sister, the friend whose house you have gone to every Bijoya for twenty years. The answer changes more by household than by relationship. To the elders you pranam, the convention is the substantial piece, and it goes on the shrine rather than the sideboard. A Durga or Sherawali Mata murti in solid brass is the safe form. Where the house already keeps her, Lakshmi is the better gift than a second Durga, because Kojagari Lokkhi Pujo falls on the very next full moon and the piece gets used inside the fortnight. For a wife or a husband the gift is usually personal rather than devotional, and clothes and jewellery win that one more often than not. What works here is the small plated piece kept where she actually sits, a desk or a dre