Holiday customs of the Spring Festival

The Spring Festival is the oldest and grandest festival of the Chinese nation. How much do you know about these traditional customs about the Spring Festival, such as cutting window grilles, stick grilles, keeping New Year's Eve, New Year's greetings, etc ... The Spring Festival is coming? Let's have a look.

1- dust removal

In the folk, there is a custom of "sweeping the house on the 24th of the twelfth lunar month" on New Year's Eve. The folk proverb says "Twenty-four, sweep the house". Folk call it "Dust Day". Dust removal is year-end cleaning. Every household should clean the environment, clean all kinds of appliances, remove bedding curtains, clean the courtyard in Liu Lu, dust off cobwebs and dredge culverts in open channels. Everywhere is filled with the joyful atmosphere of cleaning and welcoming the Spring Festival cleanly. According to the folk saying, because "dust" and "Chen" are homophonic, sweeping dust years ago means "getting rid of the old and not getting new". The purpose of sweeping dust is to sweep away all bad luck and bad luck, so as to pray for a clear and auspicious year in the coming year.

2- Cut and paste window grilles

Cutting window grilles is one of many customs. There are generally two versions of the origin of window grilles.

The first argument is that before the Western Han Dynasty and the invention of papermaking, people had the practice of cutting various materials into thin slices and making handicrafts by hollowing out and carving. People not only post their own works, but also give them to relatives and friends. Later, with the invention of paper, people began to use light and cheap paper instead. It wasn't until the Song and Yuan Dynasties that people put on spring festival couplets and posted them, and this custom gradually formed.

The second statement comes from a myth and legend. According to legend, during the reign of Yao in ancient times, there was a phoenix-like stork that protected one side of the people. But in the seventh year, the birds stopped flying, causing monsters to wreak havoc. Then came a bird named Chongming, which soon got into a fight with wild animals from all directions, leaving a reputation. The people admire it very much, but only a few times a year, the people are attacked by ghosts and beasts.

Therefore, people carve golden birds or wooden chickens according to the image of "regaining sight" and stick them on the windows. Strangely, the monsters and beasts all ran away after seeing them, and never dared to attack again. Subsequently, this gradually evolved into a folk custom. With people's innovation, there are more and more styles of window grilles.

Santie Spring Festival couplets

Spring Festival couplets have a history of thousands of years. According to the records in Jade Candle Collection and Yanjing Year, the original form of Spring Festival couplets is what people call "Fu Tao". In the Song Dynasty, people began to write couplets on mahogany boards, one for killing evil spirits, the other for expressing good wishes, and the third for decorating the portal for beauty. Later, people wrote couplets on red paper symbolizing happiness and auspiciousness and posted them on both sides of doors and windows during the Spring Festival to express people's good wishes for good luck in the coming year.

In addition to Spring Festival couplets, many places still keep the custom of sticking doors. In the folk, the door god is a symbol of justice and strength, and because the doors of the house are usually two opposite, the door god is always in pairs. After the Tang Dynasty, besides peace, people also regarded Qin and Weichi Gong, two military commanders in the Tang Dynasty, as gatekeepers. Since then, the custom of taking these two celebrities as door gods has begun to spread widely among the people.

4- Shousui

In ancient times, there was a fierce monster scattered in the mountains. People call them nian. Its appearance is ferocious, its nature is ferocious, it only eats birds and animals, and its taste changes every day, from kowtowing insects to living people, which makes people talk about "Nian". Later, people gradually mastered the activity law of "Nian", that is, every 365 days, people go to places where people live in concentrated communities to taste fresh food. The haunting time is after dark, and when the rooster crows at dawn, they return to the mountains.

After determining the date of the ravages of 2008, people regarded this terrible night as a gateway, and came up with a set of methods to close the New Year's Day: every family cooked dinner in advance, turned off the fire, cleaned the stove, then tied up all the stalls in the henhouse, sealed the front and rear doors of the house and hid in the house for New Year's Eve dinner.

The meal was very rich because of its ominous significance. In addition to letting the whole family eat together to show harmonious reunion, it is also necessary to make sacrifices to ancestors before eating and pray for their blessing to spend the night safely. After dinner, no one dared to sleep, so they sat together and got up the courage to chat. Gradually formed the habit of not sleeping on New Year's Eve.

Keeping old means that time flies for the elderly, which means cherishing time. For teenagers, there is a feeling of budding and exuberance, and a feeling of striving for progress. Guarding the old age embodies the beautiful vision of family reunion, reminiscing about family ties, saying goodbye to the old and welcoming the new.

5- New Year's Eve

New Year's Eve, also known as New Year's Eve, reunion dinner, reunion dinner and so on. , especially the family dinner on New Year's Eve at the end of the year. The New Year's Eve dinner originated from the ancient ritual vessels at the end of the year, and it is a reunion dinner after offering sacrifices to the gods and ancestors. New Year's Eve is the highlight of the year, which is not only colorful, but also very interesting. Worship the gods and ancestors before the reunion dinner, and eat after the worship ceremony. Generally, there are chicken (meaning to have a plan), fish (meaning to have more than one year), oyster sauce (meaning to have a good market), Nostoc flagelliforme (meaning to get rich), yuba (meaning to get rich), lotus root (meaning to be smart), lettuce (meaning to make money), raw garlic (meaning to be able to count) and sausage (meaning to be long-lasting) for good luck. China people's New Year's Eve dinner is a family reunion dinner, which is the most abundant and important dinner in a year.

Spring Festival is one of the oldest festivals in China, and it is also the most important festival in a year. In the course of thousands of years of historical development, some relatively fixed customs and habits to celebrate this festival have been passed down from generation to generation.