House Warming Ceremony Gifts

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House warming ceremony gifts A griha pravesh produces more duplicate gifts than any other Indian function. Someone brings a wall clock. Two people bring the same brass Ganesha without knowing it. A third brings something lovely that has nowhere to go, because the house is still mostly empty and the shelves it was chosen for do not exist yet. The family thanks everybody, and a fair amount of it goes into a cupboard that week and stays there. What survives is the gift with a place already decided for it. A new home sets up three surfaces before anything else: the threshold, the mandir shelf and the entrance table. That is the whole reason the traditional house warming ceremony gifts are traditional. They were not chosen for symbolism alone. They were chosen because a house on its first day has somewhere to put them. What happens at a house warming ceremony Worth knowing before you choose, because the gift is meant to fit the day rather than the decor. The ceremony goes by different names for the same idea. Griha pravesh and grah pravesh in the north, gruhapravesham in the south, and Vastu Shanti across Maharashtra and Gujarat, where the emphasis falls on settling the house itself rather than on the family entering it. In English it turns up as a house warming, a home inauguration or a house opening ceremony, and all of them mean the same morning. The date is fixed to a muhurat rather than to a weekend, which is why these functions land on odd weekday mornings and why the gift shopping happens in a hurry. A Ganesh puja opens it, since Ganapati is invoked at the start of any rite. A kalash, a pot of water topped with mango leaves and a coconut, is carried in at the front. The family crosses the threshold for the first time, in many households right foot first. Milk is set to boil over on the new stove, the overflow standing for abundance, and in many families the first cooking is something sweet. A lamp is lit and, in most houses, kept lit through the day. Two things fo