Songkran Daze in Chiang Mai

Happy Songkran Everyone

It has begun. The biggest water fight in the world and we are in the center of it here in Chiang Mai, the capital of Songkran. It’s a wild festival and really needs to be seen to be believed. Massive water fights break out all across the country and it makes you feel like a kid again.

It is the Thai New Year. It’s a time for cleansing and a time for renewal. The water washes away all the bad so you can start the year fresh, clean from all that is wrong in the world. 

It’s a happy time of the year where complete strangers can dump water over each others heads and smile about it. It’s an amazing experience and the rest of the world could learn a lot from it. It’s not uncommon for people to throw water at the Police and the Police take it with a smile.  

It’s a Buddhist festival. People bring sand to the temples  in order to replace the dirt that they have carried out with feet  in the past year.The sand is shaped into little stupas— miniature sand-sculptures  which  you can view at temples during  the Songkran festival. Buddha statues are paraded through the streets in order for people to pour water over them, respectfully

 “bathing” the holy images. 

Throughout the festival, a strong emphasis is placed on renewing traditional family values by showing respect and deference to elders. This is where the practice of throwing water comes from; it began by pouring scented water on the hands of elders to show respect and ask for blessings for the new year. 

For the next 5 or 6 days Thailand will stop to play, to wash away their troubles and worries. In Chiang Mai traffic will not move, trucks will be decked out with colorful powders and paint, giant tubs and trash cans will be filled with water and blocks of ice, if you go out you will get wet. People will play like children, they will laugh and dance, there will be parades, concerts and respectful temple ceremonies, food, family, friends and Thailand will smile. 

Amy and her crew are ready to go.

Did I mention the average daily temperature right now is 107/42

Happy New Year everyone. Sawadee Bee Mai. 

The Karen People – pronunciation:kuh-ren

The Karen People

Mountains to the Karen are a very important part of their lives and of their history. Northern Thailand is a mountainous region inhabited by the foothills of the Himalayans, home to the largest mountain in the world, Mount Everest. The Karen people have always been closely connected to this beautiful mountainous land which sustains them.

The Karen have always been environmentally aware and because of this they have avoided farming methods which involved cutting down trees. It is said they feared the spirits so they didn't cut down the trees. This connection with nature is part of what it means to be Karen.

For many generations, the Karen people have lived in harmony with the forest. Only if teak trees reached a certain size could they be harvested. They were replanted and the logs were transported by elephants and river rafts. Forest-dwelling Karens build their houses of bamboo with some wood, perched on stilts with thatched roofs.

 
Many Karen who migrate to more urban areas choose career paths that involve the forest, such as trekking guides or building from bamboo. Our friend Sombat has lived in Chiang Mai for nearly 15 years and still chooses to run treks for tourists all the way back to his Karen village in the mountains. He is at home in the forest.

There are about 5 million Karen tribal members living in Myanmar (Burma). Another 300,000 Karen people are in Thailand, and thousands of others live there as refugees having fled the conflict with the Burmese military. They are said to have migrated from Yunnan China into Burma in the 8th century where they settled and continue to live in the low mountains along the Burma - Thailand border.

Karen society is a matriarchal one. Traditionally, either a boy or a girl can propose marriage. The whole village is allowed a say whether their marriage would be appropriate and not offensive to any spirits. Weddings are festive occasions when both the bride's and groom's villages come together. Unmarried girls wear simple, long white dresses called hsay mo htoo in Sgaw Karen. Once married the bride changes from her unmarried woman's long dress to a married woman's two-part outfit.

The Karen women's tunics are often elaborately embroidered with colored thread and seed-beads. The men's tunics are plain, having only fringed hems. Karen women are known for their fine cotton weaving of clothing, blankets, and bags. The weaving is usually done on a small loom set up with a strap that wraps around the waist at one end, but in some areas there are large wooden frame looms as well.

The thread is dyed sometimes with patterns producing a tie-dyed affect. Each of the many sections of this large ethnic group has its own style of dress. Our Karen friends only have to look at a piece of Karen weaving and they immediately identify where it comes from, saying “ Oh that comes from such and such area.”

The Karen also produce gorgeous etched silver jewelry, baskets, and musical instruments.

The Karens have several musical instruments of importance. The Karen drum is a symbol of the culture. It is round and made of cast bronze, often decorated with figures of frogs and elephants. Bronze drums were used among the Karen as a device to assure prosperity by inducing the spirits to bring rain, by taking the spirit of the dead into the after-life and by assembling groups including the ancestor spirits for funerals, marriages and house-entering ceremonies. The drums were used to entice the spirits of the ancestors to attend important occasions and during some rituals the drums were the seat of the spirit.

The Karens play a harp called the t'na ,

which has five or six strings and is tuned

with pegs along the neck of the instrument.

The Karen harp, only played by men,
is traditionally a courting instrument,
the player usually accompanying his singing

Music that uses the repetitive beat of metal gongs accompanies such dances as the rice-planting dance and the bamboo dance, as well as wedding processions. In the bamboo dance, sets of eight to twelve long bamboo poles are placed in a grid. Participants kneel on the ground and bang the poles together in time to the music, while dancers step in and out of the openings in the grid.

The Karens have htas, It is a form of oral poetry which are normally sung on special occasions such as weddings and funerals, the Pwo Karens also developed dong dancing, which is performed with htas set to music. Dong, or dou as it is actually pronounced in Pwo Karen, means to be in unison or in agreement. It comes from the fact that originally the dong master would write a song about someone in the village who had committed some misdeed. Hta singers would describe the person’s immoral behavior while dancers would dance to this song. If the person asked, "Who is saying these things against me?" the dong master would identify himself as the accuser. But the dancers would also join in and say, "We all agree. Given that contemporary Karen written communication only occurred in the 1800s you can see the importance or oral communication to Karen history.

The month of August marks a time of year when the bonds of tradition that bind the Karen people are tied in a symbolic but also quite literal way. In Karen families and communities around the world white threads are tied around wrists in a ceremony known as Lah Ku Kee Su.

Lah Ku means August and Kee Su describes the act of binding the wrist. Traditionally the festival takes place at the time of the August full moon

Karen elders get things going by singing a traditional song and then explaining to the community the ancient meaning of the ceremonies that follow. These ceremonies begin with prayers imploring the spirits—or K’la—to return from wherever they are roaming and to stay in the family and community circle.

The wrist-tying ceremony follows. The Karen elders wind white thread three times around the wrists of seven young unmarried couples, knotting the bracelets and breaking the thread with their fingers. Then the ceremony is repeated with the rest of the community.

The chief purpose of the festival is to reinforce Karen identity and contribute to the continuation of Karen culture.

Ethnic Karen large boho floor pillow / cushion

Siamese Dream Design is repurposing beautiful Karen textiles into colorful home decor. Giant colorful floor pillows is just a start. We'll be traveling soon to some of our friends villages in the mountains for a bit of added inspiration for additional home decor items from this very beautiful Karen woven fabric.

Ethnic Karen large pink boho floor pillow

Funky purple and yellow ethnic Karen fringed floor pillow

Big, Bright, Fun & Funky Double Sided  

Boho Floor Pillow / Cushion Cover With Tassels.

Ethnic Karen tribal woven cotton in a great super sized floor pillow or cushion. Perfect for throwing your body on to read, watch TV or just relax. Pile them up, mix and match with other colorful pillows for a style that is uniquely yours

                               Purple and yellow Karen floor pillow

Dying textile traditions in the mountains of South East Asia

She’s lived in these mountains for as long as she can remember, but it's all different now.  Now there are roads and shops and the young people are leaving. They are leaving for the cities, for factory jobs and tourist spots. They are leaving without the tribal skills, the skills which they did not care to learn. The skills they felt would not provide the things people down there, in the city value. The skills her grandmother taught her mother, and her mother taught her and she taught her daughter. "Is this where it ends?" she wonders.

Yet she smiles as she sits in her hut and draws the batik as she has for years. It is a part of her, the culture, the Hmong tribal ways. The women sitting together embroidering, chatting, after a day of gathering or planting in the hills. Will it end here? These beautiful skills lost forever remembered only by these hills that witnessed the beauty of it, and the grandmothers that created them.