Hello

I am from a really strict family and my parents are from Sri Lanka, they moved to the UK and got married. I grew up mostly here in England, I get to learn so much about my own cultures and when I was little I only know how to speak Tamil, which is my first language. The first ever english filmI watched was Harry Potter the Philosopher's Stone. It was amazing. I really loved the movie so much that I started reading the book and continued watching more of the Harry Potter films. My family enjoys watching Harry Potter films to this day and my culture doesn’t really affect anyone.

 

When we are born, we wait for the baby to become 1 month old and we celebrate it by giving the child blessing, also that’s the time we name the child and whisper into their ear. Then we invite all of our relatives to celebrate the baby's first month. When the baby becomes 1 year old, we will have a birthday party and before we start anything, we first want all the guests to come and we put a sheet over the child and we pour sweets, money, pencil, pens, car keys, gold necklace, rings. The child has to pick one of them and this will show how they will become as they grow up and I picked up a pen. 

 

This is mostly for girls, once they become of age, we have a ceremony to announce that the girl has become a woman. They will wear a saree and have their family give their blessing to the girl and around lunch everyone will have a feast and around the evening we finally cut the cake and then end with dancing. For the wedding is much different, we have 2 stages, first we get engaged not using the rings but plates filled with fruits exchanged by two families. Then they will fix the date and they have to send the invitation in person to show their respect to the family, but if some of your relatives are overseas, you can send an invitation by mail. Once the wedding starts everyone on both sides of the family has to get ready really early and start preparing the decorations and dressing up the groom and the bride. 

 

Once the hall is ready full of decorations, the guest will start arriving and we give first starters to the guest like cake and sweets. The groom arrives first and then later the bride, instead of using a ring we use golden thali chain which means you are now connected with your husband. Once the wedding is over, we will have a reception where the bride and groom will have fun with their family and start dancing. Also a moment where we are going to talk about the bride and groom’s childhood. 

 

Around January we will have a Harvest Festival, which we call it Pongal. It’s our new year and we celebrate it by staying up until the sunrise and we make sugar rise, the sugar rice will rise once the sun is up. Then we give a feast to our family, mostly vegetarian, and at the end we play games to end the festival nicely. 

 

This is my culture and my background, my family are originally from Sri Lanka and these are originally from there. Being part of this is really exciting and interesting, thank you for reading.