There are some memories that don't arrive as thoughts.
They arrive as colour.
When I think about Vesak in Sri Lanka, I don't remember dates or meanings first. I don't think about history or religion.
I remember light.
I remember being a little girl standing in our garden with my brother, holding lanterns in our hands and looking up into the trees. The evening air was warm, the sky had just started turning dark and suddenly, almost overnight, everything around us seemed to glow.
For a few nights each year, Sri Lanka felt transformed.
The trees weren't just trees anymore. They carried little lights.
The streets weren't just streets. They became rivers of colour.
And even now, all these years later, that feeling still sits somewhere inside me.
Vesak is one of the most important Buddhist celebrations in Sri Lanka, marking the birth, enlightenment and passing of the Buddha. In Sri Lanka, many religious holidays follow the lunar calendar rather than fixed dates, which means Vesak shifts each year according to the full moon. Full moon days, known as 'Poya' days, are much awaited by children as they are public holidays across the country.
During Vesak, that full moon seems to bring with it something extraordinary — light, generosity and a feeling that the whole country has quietly changed for a few days.
But as a child, I didn't know any of that.
I only knew that something beautiful was happening.
We were Christian, so we didn't celebrate Vesak as a religious holiday. It belonged to Buddhism and we understood that. But somehow that didn't matter when it came to the magic of it.
Everyone decorated.
How could you not?
We would sit together making koodu (referred to as Vesak koodu) generally means a frame, structure, enclosure— the lanterns that seemed to appear everywhere. There was an art to building them.
We'd strip coconut leaves down to their centre rib and use those thin pieces to create frames. Little three-dimensional skeletons held together with the smallest pieces of string possible because you didn't want anyone seeing the joins.
Then came the tissue paper.
Bright pinks. Deep reds. Blues and yellows and purples or beautiful white.
Carefully cut and pasted. And somehow, piece by piece, this delicate little structure would appear in your hands. And then we'd hang them in the garden.
That was the best part.
Because, suddenly, something you had made with your own hands stopped being paper and sticks and string.
It became light.
.
But Vesak wasn't only beautiful.
It was generous.
As the decorations became bigger and more elaborate, people would travel from different parts of Sri Lanka to the towns to see them. Going out to see the lights became an event in itself. Families would drive around, people would wander through streets filled with lanterns and huge illuminated pandals, and for a few evenings it felt as though the whole country had stepped outside together.
And that's why the dansalas made complete sense. (A dansala (Sinhala: දානශාලාව) literally comes from the word "dāna", meaning giving or offering, and "shālāva", meaning hall or place.) Literally 'a place of giving'.
Because all these people were out together, travelling from place to place, communities fed them.
Across Sri Lanka, temporary food and drink stalls would appear where everything was given away freely.
And I don't mean free in the way we think about promotions or marketing.
I mean genuinely free.
Local businesses donated products or money. Neighbours cooked together. Volunteers stood serving strangers.
You could be driving down the road and somebody would wave your car down and ask if you'd like something to eat.
Imagine that.
Someone stopping you not because they want something from you. But because they want to give you something.
Rice and dhal vegetables and sambals. Sometimes drinks. Sometimes just a quick stop before you carried on your journey.
I only remember stopping once because for us, the excitement was often driving around seeing everything.
The lights. The lanterns. The giant illuminated pandals.
The crowds of people walking around.
It felt as though an entire country had quietly decided that for a few nights, beauty mattered.
That kindness mattered. That people mattered.
Years later, I discovered something that made me smile.
When I got married, my colours were pink and purple and I worked with a designer to create tall illuminated structures throughout the wedding.
Pink and purple everywhere.
Towering shapes filled with light.
At the time I simply thought they were beautiful.
Only much later did I realise what I had done.
The little girl standing in the garden holding lanterns had quietly carried those memories with her all the way into adulthood.
Not the religion. Not the ceremony. Just the feeling.
Because perhaps culture doesn't always live in the traditions we formally celebrate.
Sometimes it lives in colour. Sometimes it lives in candlelight.
And sometimes it waits patiently inside us, only to reappear years later when we realise we have been carrying it all along.
If you'd like to bring a little of Sri Lanka into your own kitchen, we've created Little Big Flavour Kits to make those flavours easy to explore at home. You can find them here: Little Big Flavour Kits
