Malaysian Festivals

This is a harvest festival - the Tamil equivalent of Thanksgiving. It is held to honor the Sun, for a bountiful harvest. Families gather to rejoice and share their joy and their harvests with others. The Sun is offered a "Pongal" of rice and milk.



Thai Pongal is celebrated on January 14th every year. The month of Thai (January) is the harvest season in the Thamil homeland spanning from Thamil Nadu to Thamil Eelam. Pongal refers to rice cooked in milk and sweetened with brown sugar (chakkarai, from which the English word jaggery is derived). On a full scale it is a three-day festival of nature-worship.



It includes feeding the birds that are part of the beauty of nature, and offering thanks to the cattle, Mattu Pongal, which gives milk and plough the fields. Jallikkattu is a peaceful sport involving bulls celebrated by young men as a part of 3-day Thai Pongal.



Thai Pongal festival is celebrated in mid-January, or the Tamil month of Thai, to coincide with the rice harvest.
Pongal refers to boiling rice in a pot for consumption. The sun gives life to the rice. The instruments of this transmutation are the pot and the oxen that assist the farmers in preparing the rice fields and threshing the grains.