The Onam Sadhya, a vegetarian feast traditionally served on a fresh banana leaf and made up of as many as twenty or more individual dishes arranged in a specific order, from crunchy fried accompaniments to multiple curries and a final sweet payasam, is prepared and shared across Kerala households and workplaces during Onam regardless of the political disagreement over how the festival's central story should be framed, making the meal itself one of the least contested and most universally practised elements of the whole ten-day observance.
The Onam season is also marked by vallam kali, snake boat races held on Kerala's rivers and backwaters using long, narrow boats crewed by scores of rowers paddling in unison to drumbeats, the best known of which, the Nehru Trophy Boat Race on the Pamba River, now draws large crowds and international visitors as one of Kerala's most recognisable annual sporting spectacles, a communal and competitive dimension of the Onam season that, like the Sadhya, sits comfortably alongside Kerala's determinedly cross-religious, non-sectarian framing of the festival as a whole.
Alongside the Sadhya and the boat races, Onam households and public spaces are marked by pookalam, elaborate carpets of fresh flower petals laid out in concentric geometric patterns in the courtyard each morning of the ten-day season, growing larger and more intricate as Onam approaches; competitions for the best pookalam are now held by schools, offices and residents' associations across Kerala and in Malayali diaspora communities, making the flower carpet as recognisable a marker of the season as the feast itself.