Category: Urban Essays

Our small lantern festival

The Hakata Lantern Arts Festival is an event we watch for every year. Sadly, last year it suffered because of typhoon wind and rain, so we were looking forward to going to this year’s eleventh anniversary festival; but we had to give it up because of our work schedule. We finished supper earlier than usual and expected to see the last thirty minutes, but something came up, and our time ran out. There was so little time left, we probably couldn’t have seen the cleaning after the event even if we went there in a hurry…

But it was hard to give up, so we collected all candle holders in our house and decided to have a small festival by ourselves. The glass one and handmade pottery one were birthday presents. The ceramic one was from Chris’ cousin. The stone one Chris has had for a long time. The red glass one I bought in the Philippines as a souvenir. We don’t have the same kinds, and there were only five, but we thought it was fine on the table for fun.

The flame flickered even thought they were inside the house. (Our house is not new so we feel drafts anytime, anywhere in the house.) The cherry flower pattern on the glass candle, as it flickered larger and smaller in turn, was really quite atmospheric.

We were in the house. We’d had supper. There was nothing to fill the time if we only watched the candle lights. So we opened a bottle of red wine from the neighbourhood supermarket and had cheese and crackers to go with our lantern festival. The soundtrack was The Cure. We felt so so good!

But it was different from the feeling of lanterns along the roadside, or the picture made by some hundreds or thousands of lanterns at a schoolground or park. We just hope we can go to see it next year.

–YS, 23 October 2005

23 October 2005