Onam Gifts

About

The traditional Onam gift is cloth, and that is worth knowing first Onam is Kerala's harvest festival, ten days in the Malayalam month of Chingam, which falls in late August or early September and ends on Thiruvonam. It marks the one visit King Mahabali is granted each year to see his people prosperous. The pookalam grows at the doorstep a ring at a time, the Onasadya is served on a banana leaf, and on the morning itself the elders of a family hand the younger ones Onakodi, new cloth. Onakkodi and onappudava are the same custom under different names, kodi meaning new and pudava meaning cloth, and it is usually a kasavu mundu or a kasavu saree with the gold border. So if you want the answer a Malayali household would actually give, it is cloth. No shop selling brass should pretend otherwise. Everything below is the second gift, the one still in the house next Chingam. What a lasting piece adds beside the Onakodi Cloth is worn and eventually folded away. The reason people give an object as well is that Onam is the festival where the house itself is dressed. The threshold gets the pookalam, the front room is swept and lit, and relatives who have not visited all year walk through the door. A piece that sits at an entrance or on a shelf is doing its work on precisely the day the house is being looked at. It is also why decorative is the safer choice for a household you do not know well. Onam is kept by Malayalis of every faith, as a harvest and cultural festival more than a religious one, and a good share of Onam gifting crosses between families who do not share a shelf. The uruli is the one genuinely Kerala object we make The urli, uruli in Malayalam, began in Kerala as a bell metal cooking and Ayurvedic vessel long before it became the wide shallow bowl set at an entrance with water and floating flowers. It is the closest thing we make to the festival itself, since the pookalam and the uruli are doing the same job at the same doorstep. Ours are decorative sets rather t