Hi everyone, in this post I shared with you my activity today to help my wife making offerings. The Balinese make offerings almost everyday to present to their God and ancestor. Well, making and presenting offerings is also one of my activities almost everyday.
The offerings are made from coconut leaves, pandan leaves, and flowers. First, we cut the coconut leaves, and make little baskets from them. These baskets are the base of offerings. Next, we put different color of flowers on to the baskets. At the end, on the top of the flowers, we add some sliced pandan leaves.
This offerings are then presented to the altars or to the family temple at home. This is a daily routine. People do this first thing in the morning, or in the evening whenever they can do it.
When we ask our family (elders) why we make offerings, their reply usually, well, it has been done through generations. It's supposed to be like that. So, we would continue doing that and pass it down to our children and grand children.
My thinking is that at the beginning, our great great grand parents probably used anything they can find. Any leaves which were easy to find, so were the flowers. Then they made offerings.
Nowadays, we can not find those ingredients easily. We have to buy the coconut leaves as well as the flowers. We could not just pick any coconut leaves, or any flowers which belong to other people. So, everyday we have to allocate some money for offerings.
On the Balinese Hindu Holidays in Bali, the offerings are bigger and more ornate. More flowers, coconut leaves, fruit, and cakes are used. Hence, we require more fund to allocate for temple festival and holy days.
And there are a lot of Holy days in Bali that we have to make quite a lot of offerings during the year.
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