Mother's Day Thai Style

This past Friday was the national holiday of Mother’s Day here in Thailand, which is on the Queen’s Birthday. On Thursday I got to witness my first real Thai cultural celebration of sorts in the form of a ceremony preformed by the students at the school. I suppose you could equate it to a Christmas play in Elementary, but obviously not the same.  First, the whole school was dressed in blue to represent the Queen. We all stood in the big courtyard outside and on the stage an altar was set up with a big picture of the Queen and some sort of Buddhist ceremony began. This consisted of a boy and a girl walking up to the picture carrying some sort of round statue thing, bowing, and placing the statue in front of the Queen’s picture. This was done in a very slow, solemn, respectful way. Then another 2 students, male and female would come out, bow before the picture and pick up the same statues and place them next to the Queen’s picture. This was done about 5 times so that there were 5 of the statue things lined up next to the Queen’s picture.

Next, dancers dressed traditionally in beautiful blue costumes with a large flower in their hair, came out and preformed a slow-graceful dance.  After that, some students and teachers came out and gave speeches. One teacher started to cry as she was speaking and most of the other Thai teachers in the audience were dabbing their eyes. So of course myself, and the other non-Thai speakers, are dying to know what she was talking about. Later I asked my students and they told me the teacher was relating some sort of story about her mother, which was all I could gather. The price we pay for not understanding Thai. L

Other than the celebration at school, I’ve seen more than the usual amount of “Long Live the Queen” signs and billboards up lately in honor of the Queen’s birthday. As I was riding the bus home on Wednesday there was a procession of trucks driving by, decked out with streamers and each with a loud speaker and a large picture of the Queen in the bed of the truck. Each picture was different and there were depictions of her younger days up until recently. The speakers were playing some type of traditional music.

The last interesting thing I saw relating to Mother’s Day was a special table put up in front of one of the spirit houses that had an entire prepared Turkey as an offering, along with the typical incense and drinks that you always see sitting on the spirit houses as gifts to the spirits. I wonder what they do with the Turkey after the fact?