Malaysian celebrities reminisce about their favorite Hari Raya memories in a story on the site Sun2Surf, and lament the old traditions that have been swallowed up by shopping-mall string lights and a collective haul away from the kampung to the estrangement of big-city life.  It seems every "kampung" across the globe is lonely and getting lonelier.  But what I've experienced over the past several days was perhaps more of the traditional village celebration than even these Malaysians have encountered.  The traditional ketupot pulut are still being made; I wrapped some myself.  I saw ladies painstakingly cutting, rolling, embossing and painting pineapple tarts.  We visited a student's village down a one-and-a-half-lane byway where we sat in the neighbor's house and ate fermented rice wrapped in rubber plant leaves until our host had finished preparing Nasi Minyak.  At night the village would light up with candles and homemade fireworks.  

Perhaps with shopping-mall lights, too.  I can't know for certain whether the memories these people describe still exist in the remote kampung that I visited.  But a lot of what they describe now sounds very familiar.