The time of the Cold Food Festival

The Cold Food Festival is held one or two days before Tomb-Sweeping Day in the Gregorian calendar every year.

The Cold Food Festival is a traditional festival in China, after the summer solstice 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. In the development of later generations, the customs of sweeping, climbing, swinging, cuju, crochet and cockfighting were gradually increased. The Cold Food Festival lasted for more than 2,000 years and was once called the largest folk festival in China.

Cold Food Festival is the only traditional festival of Han nationality named after food customs. Jin Wengong remembered his loyalty, buried him in Mianshan, built a shrine and a temple, and ordered the prohibition of cold food on the day of Jiexiu to express his grief. This is the origin of the "Cold Food Festival". Before the calendar reform in Tang Ruowang in the early Qing Dynasty, Tomb-Sweeping Day was scheduled for two days after the Cold Food Festival. After the reform of the Tang family, the Cold Food Festival was held the day before Tomb-Sweeping Day. The definition of the modern twenty-four solar terms follows that of the Tang Dynasty, so the Cold Food Festival is the day before Tomb-Sweeping Day.

The custom of Cold Food Festival:

The Cold Food Festival was also called "No Smoking Festival" in ancient times. Everyone is forbidden to make a fire and eat cold food. However, due to the persistent pursuit of sages by Chinese people, it was repeatedly banned from the Eastern Han Dynasty to the Southern and Northern Dynasties, and it was not until the Tang Dynasty that it was recognized and participated by the royal family. "Try new fire and new tea" in Su Shi's Looking at the South of the Yangtze River is about brew tea's behavior after the poet's cold food.

The folk custom of forbidding fire and cold food in Shanxi is mostly one day, and only a few places are used to forbidding fire for three days. The Cold Food Festival is celebrated by steaming cold swallows. Flour is kneaded into swallows, songbirds, animals, melons and fruits, flowers, etc. The steamed swallows are colored, inserted into the needles of jujube trees, decorated indoors and given as gifts.