Celebrating Pongal – May the Rice Overflow!

As a multicultural family, my wife and I celebrate diverse cultural traditions. I wrote about this a while back (check it out here), describing how embracing something new and different can expand our worldview, foster personal growth, and deepen our appreciation of what we already have. Celebrating Pongal is one of those things.

Pongal, also known as Thamizhar Thirunal, or “festival of Tamils,” is a major harvest festival observed by the Tamil diaspora. The word Pongal literally means to “boil over” or “overflow.” It also refers to the festival’s signature dish that combines rice and lentils and comes in two main varieties: Sakkarai Pongal (sweet, made with jaggery) and Ven Pongal (savory, made with spices like black pepper and cumin).

Hailing from Tamil Nadu myself, I grew up in a Christian family. As such, we didn’t really celebrate Pongal, a Hindu festival, in our household. But Tamils are known for their love of food and strong sense of community, and make no mistake, Pongal is one occasion when this holds true. During the festival, our neighbors often invited us to join and share in the day’s festivities. Even though we weren’t Hindus per se, the festival and its celebrants didn’t care about it. For me, growing up in India, this perspective deepened my connection to cultural identity rather than religious distinctions.

Pongal is a multi-day harvest festival with several legends attached to its religious significance. There is the tale of the Hindu God Shiva and his bull, Nandi, who mistakenly advises humans to eat daily and bathe monthly, rather than the other way around. Another tale involves a second member of the Hindu trinity, Lord Krishna, who protects humans from Indra’s wrath (the god of thunder). These legends are incorporated within the four days of the festival, starting with Bhogi, and followed by Thai Pongal, Mattu Pongal, and Kaanum Pongal.

During Bhogi, people discard and burn old belongings, clean their homes, and celebrate the arrival of new possessions. The day after, Thai Pongal, represents the principal theme of the festival: tribute is paid to the Sun god Surya and the start of his six-month-long journey northwards, when the Sun enters the constellation of Capricorn. The ensuing celebrations also thank the land’s overflowing bounty and the year’s harvest. On Mattu Pongal, farm animals, primarily cows, are celebrated as sources of wealth for their provision of dairy and fertilizer and for their use in agriculture. The festivities are brought to a close on the fourth day of Kaanum Pongal, when families visit one another and reunite before embarking on the new year.

Needless to say, there is much to celebrate and plenty of food to go around during Pongal. Living in Calgary, Canada, it is not so easy to celebrate Pongal the traditional way in the freezing cold. Instead, I take some liberties and focus more on the festival’s contextual and spiritual meaning. For Bhogi, I aim for an eco-friendly approach, reflecting on the previous year, letting go of regrets and negativity, and setting positive resolutions for the new year. Having a little kid around also means there are old clothes (my daughter has outgrown) to discard, so instead of burning them, we donate them. On Thai Pongal, while I can’t really decorate my house with banana and mango leaves, I can certainly make the day’s traditional dishes, dress up for the occasion, and practice drawing kolams (a decorative art drawn using rice flour with natural or synthetic color powder, or, in my case, chalk markers and a blackboard). The last two days of Pongal are wrapped together in eating the leftovers, thanking, and spending quality time with family.

That being said, our 2026 celebration has a caveat. My daughter took Bhogi a little too literally and fell sick. Since then, my wife and I have carried on the prestigious parental tradition of sharing in her sickness and feeling miserable. We are getting better, though, as we gradually expel and cleanse all the “sick” from our bodies into a rising pile of tissues. These developments mean Pongal will be postponed to the weekend, when we will bundle all the exuberant festivities into two days, and as the saying goes, “Pongalo Pongal, let the rice overflow!”