The bonfire that carries Holika's name is built in public and built slowly. In many towns the pile begins to accumulate at a crossroads or a common ground days or weeks ahead, fed by wood, dried cow dung cakes and household rubbish, and in places an effigy is set on it, sometimes of Holika alone and sometimes of Holika holding the boy Prahlada.
The lighting is not at a convenient hour but at an astrologically determined one. It is timed to the full moon of the month Phalguna, and traditional almanacs specify that the fire must not be lit during the inauspicious period known as bhadra, so the hour is published in advance and can fall very late at night. Households circle the fire, and new grain of the season, chickpeas and ears of wheat and barley, is put into the embers and eaten. Ash from the fire is carried home and marked on the forehead.
That agricultural element has led some scholars to derive the festival name from holaka, a word used for parched or half ripe grain, and to read the fire as a harvest rite that the Prahlada story was later attached to. The derivation is offered rather than settled. What is not in doubt is that the story and the fire are now inseparable in practice: the burning is understood as the burning of Holika, and the colour play of the following day is understood as the celebration that follows the deliverance.