What are the Spring Festival customs in rural areas of Northeast China?

In the northeast countryside, after Laba, people began to kill pigs and chickens. One day in the twelfth lunar month, please ask the neighbors and acquaintances in the village to kill the pig early in the morning, cut the pork into pieces, freeze it directly outside the beam, and put it in a vat or barn for holidays. On the day of killing pigs, sauerkraut, bone meat, fat meat and blood sausage should be stewed in a large pot, which is what people often say. Kill pig dishes don't pay much attention to ingredients and seasonings. They just cut the freshly slaughtered pork into large pieces and put it in the pot, add water and salt, then cut sauerkraut into it while cooking, and then pour the filled blood sausage into the pot to cook. When serving, a pot of meat, a pot of sauerkraut, a plate of blood sausage, a large portion of garlic sauce, eating meat and drinking in a big bowl are very lively.

When you are approaching thirty, you should kill a big cock with red hair and leave it to stew until you are thirty, which means "good luck".

Clean the shed

After entering the 23rd of the twelfth lunar month, every household should clean up. Housewives usually cover their furniture with sheets, wrap their heads with headscarves or towels, and then sweep the walls up and down with a broom. After sweeping, scrub the tables and chairs, clean the floor, and greet the New Year neatly and brightly. China folks call it "dust sweeping" and "dust removal". Because there is a folk proverb: "If you don't sweep the dust in the twelfth lunar month, you will attract the plague in the coming year." Folklore experts say that sweeping dust not only means driving away the epidemic and praying for a healthy new year, but also means removing the "old" (dust) and promoting the new.

Catch up with the new year collection and make new year's goods

Before the Chinese New Year, we have to make a lot of preparations and buy a lot of things, including food, useful things, clothes, clothes, fun, supplies, dry things, fresh things, raw things and ripe things. The day with a unified name is called "New Year's Goods". Purchasing before the Chinese New Year is called "handling new year's goods".

New year's goods generally include firecrackers, couplets (Spring Festival couplets), lanterns, frozen pears and frozen persimmons. It is a rule to buy new clothes for children at home. Most people choose to go to the market to buy new year's goods in the countryside. The annual party has the largest number of participants in a year. At large parties, you should buy incense wax, paper yards, firecrackers, New Year pictures, red paper, sugar, rock tea, candy and seasonings to go home.

Zhengqi mantou

In the past, there were not enough cooking pots for guests during the Chinese New Year, so it was necessary to steam a few pots of steamed bread in advance for later use, as well as to worship ancestors during the Chinese New Year and make bean paste buns and the like. That's what twenty-eight handfuls of flour and twenty-nine steamed buns mean, and some even call twenty-nine handfuls of oil, which means using oil as food.

Sacrifice to gods and ancestors

Pastry, including honey sacrifice and Saqima, is generally used to worship the gods and ancestors in the old northeast, which is not only the food of Manchus, Mongolians and other ethnic minorities in the northeast, but also the necessary food for the northeast people. Northeasters also have the custom of eating fish on New Year's Eve. Fish must be carp, originally named as offering sacrifices to gods, and later associated with "auspicious celebration is more than enough" and "more than enough every year". Fish is both delicious and sacrificial. It is also important to worship ancestors. People who carry on the family line should offer rich sacrifices and incense to their ancestors. Men in the whole family should worship, and some burn paper to "money" to worship their ancestors on New Year's Eve. Sacrifice to ancestors usually ends on the third day. Before the end, the son-in-law is not allowed to look at the genealogy of the mother-in-law's family.