Loy Krathong on a pond in November

01What the night actually is

The full moon of the twelfth month in the Thai lunar calendar falls in November — sometimes very early November, sometimes the third week, depending on the year. That night is Loy Krathong: loy meaning to float, krathong meaning the float itself. The observance is old enough that its precise origin is genuinely contested; the most repeated story ties it to Nang Nopphamat, a consort at the Sukhothai court who is said to have fashioned the first elaborately decorated float, though historians note that the earliest written evidence for that story dates to the nineteenth century, well after Sukhothai had given way to Ayutthaya and then to Bangkok. What is not contested is what the float carries: a lit candle, incense, a coin and sometimes a flower, set onto moving or still water. The candle burns while the float drifts, and the act of releasing it — of watching it go — is the observance. It is an act of letting go, associated in Buddhist interpretation with releasing ill will and ill fortune, though its pre-Buddhist substrate, an offering to the spirit of the water, is never far from the surface.

The krathong itself is traditionally made from a cross-section of banana trunk, layered with folded banana leaves pinned into lotus-petal shapes, then dressed with flowers, a candle and three sticks of incense. In Thailand it takes some skill and a supply of fresh banana leaf to do it correctly, and the night before the festival families assemble them together. The full moon traditionally falls on the fifteenth day of the waxing moon of the twelfth lunar month, which the Thai calendar — a lunisolar system that intercalates periodically to stay aligned with the solar year — places firmly in what the Gregorian calendar calls November. In a year with an intercalary eighth month, the date can shift by several weeks; this is one reason the date does not repeat neatly from one Gregorian year to the next.

02Three things that travel and one that does not

The krathong travels. The candle travels. The coin travels. The river does not. In Bangkok, the Chao Phraya is wide enough that a float can drift out of sight; in Chiang Mai, the Mae Ping carries krathongs and Yi Peng lanterns at the same time, the surface lit from below and the sky lit from above. In Isan, the northeastern plateau that sends many of Vancouver's Thai families, the festival is quieter — smaller rivers, more intimate — but kept with the same structure. In Vancouver, the water is whatever is available: a park pond in Richmond, a still lake in Surrey, occasionally a fountain on a university campus. The scale changes; the sequence does not.

What the sequence requires is water, a float that will hold a flame long enough to release it, and a moment of stillness before it goes. The coin is included for merit-making — the idea that generosity given to the water accrues merit — and is one reason what goes into a krathong has changed over time: coins sink, but the banana-leaf body, if made traditionally, eventually breaks down in the water. Styrofoam, which became common in Thailand in the 1980s and 1990s, does not, and municipal authorities in Thailand's major cities began banning or discouraging it decades ago. Bread krathongs, intended to be eaten by fish, became fashionable partly for that reason, though they do not hold their shape in the same way.

03How it is kept in Vancouver

Vancouver's Thai community observes Loy Krathong through the city's Thai Buddhist temple, in a form shaped around what November in the Lower Mainland actually allows. The full moon is real — it falls whether or not the sky is clear, which in November on the Pacific coast it frequently is not — but the observance is scheduled around it rather than cancelled by rain. The krathongs that appear at a Vancouver gathering are often made at a workshop the week before: banana leaf is available from Southeast Asian grocers in Richmond, though it arrives frozen and requires thawing and drying before it folds cleanly. The banana trunk cross-section that forms the base is harder to source and is sometimes replaced with a disc of folded leaf layered over itself, or with a foam core covered entirely in natural material. The candle, incense and flowers are straightforward to find.

The evening itself tends to follow a short temple ceremony — monks chanting, offerings made — before the group moves to the water. The pond or lake is not the Chao Phraya; no one pretends otherwise. What matters is the act of setting the float down and watching the flame hold. Children who have grown up in Surrey or Richmond and have never been to Thailand in November understand the night the same way their grandparents do in Isan: something is being let go, and the water carries it.

The lunar calendar the festivals sit on means the date shifts every Gregorian year, which creates a small planning difficulty for a diaspora community working around Canadian school and work schedules. Loy Krathong does not move to a fixed Saturday; the temple sets the observance as close to the actual full moon as the community can manage. Some years that lands mid-week, and the attendance is smaller. Some years it falls on a weekend, and the pond is crowded.

November in Vancouver is cold and often wet. The candle is sheltered by hands until it catches, then released. The float turns slowly in whatever current the pond has, which is usually very little. In Thailand, the belief is that the water receives what the float carries — the bad luck, the resentment, the accumulated weight of the year — and that watching the light move away from you is the mechanism by which that transfer happens. A pond in Richmond in the rain is not a lesser version of this. It is the same full moon, the same twelfth month, the same candle.