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Next: about 14 to 15 Jan 2027

Makar Sankranti and sesame sweets

The winter-sun festival, shared with til ladoo, with the saying to speak sweetly as sesame and jaggery are sweet.

These 'tilguls', traditional marathi laddoos eaten on Makar Sankranti day.
Photo: Saloni Desai, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Spices for Makar Sankranti and sesame sweets

On Makar Sankranti the sun enters Capricorn and Maharashtra exchanges til-gul, sesame sweets with jaggery, with the phrase that translates roughly as "take this sweet and speak sweetly". Sesame is warming and oily, so winter is its season, and the sweets often include cardamom. In Gujarat undhiyu, a winter vegetable dish, is made with a green paste of coriander leaf, chilli, garlic and ground sesame, and in Bengal the pithe are scented with cardamom. Kite flying fills the sky in Gujarat while the feasting goes on.

The spices

SesameThe seed of the season, in til ladoo and chikki.CardamomScents winter sweets and pithe.CorianderFresh leaf and ground seed go into undhiyu.
About this page

Written by the EveryMasala desk with AI assistance. Background: "Makar Sankranti" on Wikipedia. Customs differ from place to place and family to family. If this is your tradition and we have it wrong, tell us.

Photo credits on this page

The small pictures above come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences. Some are cropped to fit.

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