Losar

Tibetan New Year, known as Losar, is celebrated this month with vigor and earnestness both in the mine and monasteries by all Tibetan Buddhists. Like the Western New Year, It is a time of starting anew, and not merely with lifty resolutions but with a clean house, new clothes, and offerings and prayers to the lamas and deities.

The New Year begins on February 7, but preparations start two days before, a new moon day. Households are scrubbed clean and new furnishings installed. Family members bathe and spruce up as well. And from the second day of Losar, the real celebration begins. Friends and famikies gather in day long feast eating specially made cookies called khabje, meats fruits and various other delicacies; drinks if fermented rice or miller chhang, and distilled raksi are served in abundance.

In the olden times, it was customary for each adult sibling to host the entire family on consecutive days. Thus , large famikies might have celebrated Losar for ten or more days. Today, work demands usually shorten the festivities to several days.

The Sherpa and Tibetan Buddhists of the Kathmandu valley continue the Losar tradition with a commmunity wide gathering at the Sherpa Community center in Boudanath. On the third or fourth day of the new year.