A careful Vishu morning in a Kerala courtyard
Cotton clothes, a bucket of sand and one adult in charge: simple habits for lighting crackers after the kani.
Keeping crackers through the monsoon
From Onam to Deepavali in Kerala’s damp: how to store boxes safely.
Kerala’s festival year is long. Many families buy for Onam in August and keep some boxes for Deepavali in November, through the tail of the monsoon. Damp is what spoils crackers, so storage matters more here than almost anywhere.
Keep every item in its own closed box, and put the boxes together in a lidded plastic tub with two or three sachets of silica gel. Store the tub on a high shelf in a dry room, away from the kitchen, the bathroom wall and the nilavilakku.
Check the tub once a month. If a box feels soft, smells unusual or the paper has swollen, do not try to dry it in the sun. Soak it in a bucket of water and dispose of it with dry waste.
Use everything within a year of purchase. If you will not, give it to a family with children before the next monsoon. And keep the tub out of children’s reach all year, not just in festival season.
