Ubon Ratchathani candle festival

I just came from an amazing opportunity to see the finishing touches being put on the candles (yes, these sculptures are entirely made of wax!) for the candle festival in Ubon Ratchathani, northeast Thailand. The candle festival, or Pitee Hae Tien Pansa, celebrates the Buddhist monks going into temples for three months for meditation. My Thai friends have told me that this period of retreat was originally created for crop preservation -- during the rainy, rice-growing season, because the role of monks here is to be always traveling, the people felt it would be better for them to be retreating than to have them potentially walk over the crops. I'm sure I've got the story completely right, but I like that idea. The candles were given to the monks to keep the temples well-lit through their period of meditation, but now even though electricity is used, the candle festival goes on. Ubon Ratchathani is famous for its elaborate candles (many other cities just make large taper candles) and you can see the months of work that went into these. I was lucky enough to see the final stages of candle-making yesterday, the day before the beginning of the festival.