What is the Cold Food Festival?

Cold Food Festival, also known as "Smoke-free Festival", "Cold Food Festival" and "Hundred Days Festival", is held from the winter of the lunar calendar to the next day 105, and one or two days before Tomb-Sweeping Day. When the first day of the day is a holiday, smoking is forbidden and only cold food is eaten. Being close to Tomb-Sweeping Day in time, influenced by it, the customs of sweeping, climbing, swinging, cuju, hooking eggs and fighting eggs gradually increased in the development of later generations. The Cold Food Festival has lasted for more than 2,000 years and is called the largest folk festival.

The Cold Food Festival is related to the ancient people's understanding of nature. In China, the rebirth of a new fire after a cold meal is a transitional ceremony to bid farewell to the old and welcome the new. It reveals the information of seasonal alternation and symbolizes the beginning of a new season, a new hope, a new life and a new cycle. Later, there was a sense of gratitude, and more emphasis was placed on nostalgia and gratitude for the past. Cold food is forbidden to eat cold food tombs, and Qingming takes a new fire to travel.

When Tomb-Sweeping Day arrived, the Cold Food Festival followed. Now some people confuse cold food with Qingming, which is actually wrong. Because one is a farming solar term and the other is a folk festival, which is not the same thing. Tomb-Sweeping Day is one of the twenty-four solar terms in the China lunar calendar, usually around April 4th and 5th in the Gregorian calendar.

The Cold Food Festival is a folk festival, which originated from the story that Jie Zhituining, a minister in the Spring and Autumn Period, was burned to death on Mianshan Mountain in Jiexiu, Shanxi Province, and refused to go down to be sealed. One is farming solar terms, and the other is allusions and folk customs, which are two different things; But these two festivals are separated by one or two days, or even coincide on one day, so there is a saying of Qingming and cold food, also called Qingming.