Loy Krathong: our little flower boat

In November 2023 it had been a year since we started living in Thailand. Leia was a year and nine months old then, so she had spent most of her life here.

We first came across the Loy Krathong festival back in our first November, in 2022: there were several days of festivities, a fair, and a concert, and on the last evening people were going to float little rafts made of banana leaf with flowers, candles, and incense sticks on the water. “Loy” means “to float,” and “krathong” is a tiny raft.

It is celebrated on the full moon of the twelfth month of the Thai lunar calendar, so the date is different every year. In 2023 the festival fell on November 27, and three days before it, in a park on a lake in Phuket, preparations were already in full swing.

A krathong is a little boat made of flowers, or an edible one, with a candle. It is set afloat on the water, and it is as if sins, grudges, and bad thoughts float away with it: you can start life over with a clean slate.

On the evening of November 27 we went to the festival.

We had our own krathong too, a little flower boat.

And that is the one we set afloat on the water. There was also a king krathong at the festival. It seems it was launched later than the rest, as the grand finale of the ritual.