Monti Fest falls on 8 September, the feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and it is the feast the Mangalorean Catholic calendar is built around. The date never moves — it sits nine months after the Immaculate Conception on 8 December — so unlike almost everything else on this coast's festival calendar, you can put it in a diary years ahead.
The nine days before it are the novena. Children carry fresh flowers to the church each evening and lay them before the image of Mary, and by the ninth day the altar is buried in them. It is the part of the feast people remember from childhood, and it is the reason Monti Fest reads as a children's festival as much as a Marian one.
What makes it Mangalorean rather than simply Catholic is the novem — the new crop. Sheaves of the season's first paddy are blessed at the morning Mass and carried home. The grains are added to milk, and the family eats them together before anything else that day: a vegetarian meal, everyone at one table, relatives travelling back from wherever they now live to be at it. It is a harvest thanksgiving wearing a feast day's clothes, and it is why the festival survived migration — a Mangalorean family in Mumbai or Dubai still holds the meal.
The feast is celebrated in every parish across Dakshina Kannada and Udupi, but Monte Mariano Church at Farangipete is the one with the claim on its origin. Fr Joachim Miranda established the church there in 1763, and the first Monti Fest is traced to it. Farangipete is about 20 km east of Mangalore on the Bantwal road; the parish nearest you will be doing the same thing on the same morning.