When we start to fear decorations

COMMENT | One of my earliest memories in kindergarten was making tanglungs out of coloured paper. It is simple, really. You fold a rectangular piece of paper in half and cut strips (but not all the way) along the middle of the paper. Unfold the paper, stick the two ends together and voila - the whole class did not suddenly transform into Buddhists.

Instead, we decorated our whole classroom with the tanglungs, and the collective power of the tanglungs still did not convert all of us into adopting Buddhism.

I have seen thousands of lanterns in my life, and it has done pretty much nothing to shake my faith. Some of my favourite lanterns are the accordion-style paper lanterns and the old school animal ones that kids light up with during the mooncake festival.