This isn't my festival. I'm an American living in Bangkok, and what I know about Deepavali I know as a guest, from neighbors, from friends who have had us in their homes, and from the years my children have spent being welcomed into somebody else's celebration.
So I'm not going to explain the festival to you. If it's yours, you know it far better than I do. What I can offer is the thing I do have, which is a fair amount of experience in taking small children into a loud, bright, crowded, wonderful event and getting them home again before it goes wrong. I think we've managed it three years out of four.
What she can join in with
More than you'd expect, and the good parts for a small child are mostly the quiet ones that happen at home before anybody goes anywhere.
- Rangoli, with a toddler's own patch of floor and her own bowl of colored rice or flour. Two-year-olds aren't going to produce a pattern and they're going to enjoy the material enormously.
- Flowers. Threading marigolds onto string is excellent fine-motor work and it's handy, which small children can tell.
- Helping lay out lamps, unlit, during the day. The setting-up is a real job and it lasts a satisfying amount of time.
- New clothes, which every child on earth understands.
- Watching the lamps being lit from a safe distance, up in somebody's arms.
- Being handed around and admired, which at a Deepavali gathering will happen whether or not it was on your list.
More making things
Oil lamps, and a crawling baby
Diyas are the point of the festival and they're also an open flame in an oil dish placed at floor level, which is a sentence that answers itself once there's a crawler in the house.
A baby who's pulling to stand will reach for a light, and hot oil causes a worse burn than a flame does because it stays on the skin. Plan for this during the day, calmly, instead of renegotiating in the evening with a tired child on your hip.
- Put real diyas up high, on a shelf or a ledge, or outdoors behind something a child can't get past.
- Use LED diyas at floor level. They exist, they look good in a row, and nobody has ever been burned by one.
- Keep a clear route through the house that has no lamps in it, so that a toddler running through the living room has somewhere safe to run.
- Watch the fabric. Loose clothing, dupattas and long skirts near floor lamps are the mechanism in most household burns, and children's festive clothes are exactly that shape.
- Sparklers are hotter than most parents realize and aren't a small-child activity. Watching somebody else hold one, from a distance, is plenty.
The noise and the crowds
This is the section I can write with some authority, because I've spent fourteen years learning to read it in my own family. Fireworks and firecrackers are loud enough to matter, infant ears are more vulnerable than adult ears, and sustained exposure at close range is a real risk. Ear defenders for babies and toddlers, which are cheap and work, come with us, and no one at any gathering has ever thought less of us for using them. The crowds are the other half. A festival gathering is hot, close, full of unfamiliar people who all want a turn holding the baby, and relentlessly loud in a way that doesn't let up. For most children that's exciting for about ninety minutes. For some children it's too much from the first ten, and the difficulty is that the signs of too much don't look like distress until quite late.
My eldest is autistic, and for years I mistook his particular version of overwhelmed for bad behavior, because it arrived as stubbornness and then as bolting and only at the very end as tears. What I eventually learned to watch for was the moment he stopped answering. It's the same signal in a preverbal child: she stops engaging, her face goes still, she turns into your shoulder and doesn't turn back out.
The sweets
Deepavali sweets are dense, extremely sugary, frequently nut-based, and offered constantly and with great warmth by people who are being kind.
So arrive with a plan and a yes in your hand. Whole nuts are a choking hazard until at least four and many mithai are built on them, laddu and anything ghee-heavy is very rich for a small stomach, and much of it is sticky in the way that doesn't clear from the mouth easily. A one-year-old can have a small taste of something soft and nut-free. A baby under one is better off with the fruit.
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If she has had enough
Have an exit decided before you arrive. Know where the quiet room is, know who's driving, and agree with the other adult that either of you can call it without a discussion.
Then go early. A short, happy hour at somebody's house is a better memory for everybody than three hours that ended badly, and the family whose celebration it is would far rather you came for one good hour than not at all. That's the best thing I've learned as the guest at other people's festivals, and it took me longer than it should have.
If you are carrying and not pushing
What the research says
This guide is general information, written to help you understand a topic and ask better questions. It is not medical advice and does not replace your own doctor, midwife or paediatrician. Anything that worries you about your baby belongs with them.