60th Birthday Gifts

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60th birthday gifts Two quite different occasions arrive at the same search. In most of the country a sixtieth birthday is a birthday, a large one, with a hall booked and a cake, and the gift is chosen the way any gift for a parent is chosen. In many South Indian families it is not a birthday at all. It is Shashtiabdapoorthi, a ceremony with a priest, homams and a wedding performed a second time in front of everyone present, and the gift follows a different set of rules entirely. Both are covered here, and it is worth knowing which one you are buying for before you choose anything, because the two answers genuinely differ. The ceremony carries a great many names and all of them are the same rite. Shashtiabdapoorthi or Sashtiabdapoorthi, from sashti for sixty, abda for year and poorthi for completion. Sashtiapthapoorthi is the spelling Tamil families use most often. Shashtipoorthi or shastipoorthi in Telugu and Kannada households, and shashtipurti sohala in Marathi. What the ceremony is, and why it changes the gift Sixty is the length of one full cycle of the named years in the traditional calendar, so a person completing sixty has come back round to the year they were born in, and the ceremony marks that return. It is held at the close of the sixtieth year and the opening of the sixty-first. Where that date is awkward for the family, a pandit fixes an auspicious day from the birth chart instead, which is why you will meet people holding it a little before or after the birthday itself. What happens on the day is the part that decides the gift. There is a Ganapati pooja and a sankalpam, then the homams, the Ayushya Homam for long life being the one nearly every family performs, often with the Navagraha, Dhanvantari and Maha Mrityunjaya homams alongside it. Then the couple is married again. Garlands are exchanged, the mangalyam is tied a second time, and the two of them sit through the vows in front of their children, their grandchildren and a hall of relatives. Three