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Like the western Christmas season, is by far the longest, most auspicious and most joyous time of year, celebrated countrywide by all castes and creeds during the bright lunar fortnight ending on the day of the full moon in late September of early October. Families are reunited, blessings, gifts and glad tidings are exchanged, public parades, ancient processions and traditional pageants are held, and the all-powerful goddess Durga, in all her various manifestations and names and forms, is widely acclaimed with innumerable pujas, ritual holy bathing, profuse offerings and thousands of animal sacrifices, so that her many idols are drenched for days in blood.
The festivities of these two weeks glorify the ultimate and inevitable triumph of virtue over the forces of evil, commemorating a great victory of the gods over the wicked demons and devils who harassed mankind in ancient times. The Ramayana story is retold of the righteous king Rama, deified by Hindu mythology as an incarnation of lord Visnu, or again as God himself, who after epic struggles slaughtered Ravana, the fiendish king of the demon hordes from Lanka, a legendary country believed by many to have been Ceylon. Some say Lord Rama was successful in his battle with the demon only when he evoked the Shakti or supreme energy vested in Goddess Durga, the Divine Mother of the Universe. Others have it that Ramas saintly wife Sita, having been kidnapped by the demon Ravana, assumed the form of the Terrible Destructress, Goddess kali