What's your favourite memory of Diwali?

Hi, I'm here at the Ken Sealing Museum in Kitchener where they're hosting a bespoke Diwali marketplace. Now for the people across Canada who celebrate this special event, it holds a special place in their hearts. So I wanted to know, what's your favorite memory of Diwali? The recent ones I can think of are sitting at temple at the Gurdwara celebrating Diwali in a big way through food and togetherness with my community and elders. Maybe one of my aunts making a really yummy kheer which is a rice pudding which is always served at Diwali celebrations. So a week ahead of time you start cleaning the houses, you start decorating, you will have diyas, you will have dhanteras. So it's the dhanteras where you have to buy something gold or silver. So when I was 14-year-old, I went to shop with my mom and they will usually buy a silver or a gold coin. I saw a necklace that's almost 20k at that time. I asked my mom, if you're buying it for the dearest, why can't I get it? And parents said, no, let's just get the firecrackers and just one pint and you're good to go. The best memory of Diwali is from my childhood, like when I was 14 years old. Our father used to take to the shops to buy the crackers. Like we would wait all day like for him to come home and then just, you know, go with him to buy the crackers and sweets. And then you come home very happy, you buy a lot of stuff, sweets, candies and all the stuff. And then at the night time we used to, you know, blow the crackers and all the stuff with our friends, neighbors. And that's the best part and I still remember that and I still miss that too. I come from the southern part of India. So Diwali means early morning, we get up at six o'clock and we head out of the house, start bursting crackers. And then we spend the rest of the day playing, singing, dancing and doing all of these stuff. So, you know, the greatest memory is the festive mood. So we're all celebrating the whole day until it's almost 11 in the night, watching movies, playing with cousins. So growing up, I grew up near my cousins, my younger cousins, and every Diwali we used to dress up and do fireworks outside. So that is kind of one of my fondest memories of Diwali. What does the celebration mean to you? So Diwali means to us celebrating good over evil. It stems from like a religious context where we're celebrating doing good things and kind of choosing the right path. over all the evil that exists in the world so that translates to kind of how we approach things in the world and like how everything is changing. Yeah and in this day and age how important is that for you? It's really important because like with all the changing political context and all of the things that are happening in the world it's important to take like an empathetic lens when we're going about our day-to-day lives and although this festival emerges from like a religious context I think for me it's really about how we can apply it in our daily actions and how we treat people and all of that.