Losar begins, in our house, with cleaning.
Not ordinary cleaning — the kind you do because you have run out of reasons not to. The days before the New Year are a time for sweeping out everything that has accumulated: dust, clutter, and, in the older understanding that my mother still holds to, the residue of the previous year’s sorrows and mistakes. You clean the house so that the new year has somewhere clean to arrive.
My mother starts this process about a week in advance. She moves through the rooms with a focused intensity that is slightly alarming to witness. Things that have not moved in a year are moved. The altar gets a thorough cleaning — the water bowls emptied, the butter lamp holders scrubbed, the figurines carefully wiped with a soft cloth. The smoke from months of incense is cleaned off the wall above the altar. The thangka gets a gentle dusting.
By the time Losar itself arrives, the house smells of fresh paint and juniper smoke and something that I can only describe as possibility.
What Losar Is
For those who did not grow up with it: Losar (ལོ་གསར།) is the Tibetan New Year, calculated according to the Tibetan lunar calendar. It usually falls in late January or February, a few weeks after the Chinese New Year with which it partly overlaps, though the calculation method is different and the traditions are entirely distinct.
The name is simply Tibetan for “new year” — lo (ལོ) means year, sar (གསར) means new. But the occasion carries a weight that the plain translation does not convey. In Tibet, Losar was a public celebration of enormous scale, centred on the monasteries and the court, involving ceremonies and ritual performances that lasted for weeks. The Monlam Chenmo — the Great Prayer Festival — followed shortly after, turning the period into an extended season of communal religious observance.
In exile, Losar is smaller. The monasteries here observe it with prayers and ceremony; the Tibetan government-in-exile holds official events; families gather. But the full scale of what Losar once was, within the life of a country and a culture, is something that can only be approximated here. This is one of the facts of exile that you learn to hold alongside the celebration itself — that every tradition in diaspora is also a form of remembrance.
The Khapse
One of the things that has not diminished in exile is the food.
Khapse (ཁ་ཟས) — the deep-fried pastry that appears in endless shapes and quantities at Losar — is, in my experience, one of the more effective forms of cultural continuity. It is very difficult to feel disconnected from your heritage when you are spending an entire afternoon making khapse with your mother and two aunts, covered in flour, arguing about the correct way to fold the dough.
There are many styles of khapse. The most elaborate are plaited and twisted into shapes that require considerable skill — my aunt Dechen can make a khapse that looks like a flower with eight petals, and she does it with the confident speed of someone who has made ten thousand of them, which she probably has. The simpler styles are still delicious: flat, slightly sweet, crisp at the edges and chewy at the centre, eaten with butter tea.
We make enough for the household, enough to give to neighbours, and enough to set out on the altar as an offering. By the end of the preparation, the kitchen is warm with oil smoke and Dechen is telling a story about her mother, who used to make khapse in a quantity that required a second stove.
The Morning
On Losar morning we wake early.
The traditional first act is to drink changkol — a warm, slightly fermented barley porridge — before any other food or drink, to bring good fortune for the year. My mother makes this from a recipe she learned from her own mother, and the smell of it cooking is one of those smells that does something specific to memory: it makes everything simultaneous, all the Losars at once.
We go to the temple. In Dharamsala this means, for many families, the Tsuglagkhang — the main temple adjacent to the Dalai Lama’s residence, which holds the Jowo Shakyamuni statue that has become the spiritual centre of the exile community. On Losar morning the temple is crowded and bright with butter lamps, and monks chant prayers through the early hours.
There is something both poignant and strengthening about being in that crowd. You are among your people, in a place that is not your place, observing something that has survived an enormous disruption. The continuity is the point. The act of gathering is itself the argument for gathering.
What Has Changed
I asked my mother once what Losar in Lhasa had been like, in her childhood, before 1959.
She was quiet for a moment. Then she said: “Bigger. Louder. More frightening, sometimes, because the stakes felt higher. And the mountains were different.”
I asked what she meant about the mountains.
“Here the mountains are behind everything. In Lhasa they are in front of you. Always in front. You could not look at anything without also looking at the mountains.”
This is the kind of thing that cannot be reproduced in exile — not the ceremony, not the food, not the prayers — but the specific way that a place frames everything that happens in it. Dharamsala is beautiful, and I love it as the home I have. But it is a different kind of place, and Losar here is a different kind of Losar.
Which is not to say it is lesser. It is what has been made from what was carried, and that making is its own form of devotion.
The New Year Wish
In Tibetan, the traditional Losar greeting is:
ལོ་གསར་ལ་ཚེས་ལྔ་བཅུའི་བདེ་དགའ།
Lo sar la tshe nga chu’i dega — roughly, “May the New Year bring happiness of fifty years.” The wish is that the good things of the year ahead outlast the year itself.
To all of you reading this: wherever you are, whatever your traditions, I hope the year you are entering brings things worth keeping.
Do you have Losar traditions, here in Dharamsala or wherever you are? I would love to hear about them. You can reach me through the about page.