What are the customs of the Spring Festival in Guangxi

1, pick new water, drink elixir water

According to the unique custom of the Zhuang family, the Spring Festival is to pick new water, drink elixir water. Pick new water, also known as drawing new water, picking clever water, picking good water; drink clever water, also known as "drink wisdom water", popular in Bama, Guangxi, Lingyun and other counties.

Before dawn on the first day of the Lunar New Year, big girls and small daughters-in-law of Zhuang households will pick buckets of water, hold three joss sticks of incense, sing songs, and go to the riverside to pick up water, and when they arrive at the riverside or at the place where they pick up the water, they will first put in incense, and then put in red paper-wrapped coins into the water as "lishui".

While picking up new water, they also pick up a few stones that resemble domestic animals and go home, imitating the cries of the six animals along the way.

2, dance chicken, dance spring cow

Guizhou west of the dance chicken, dance spring cow is more unique. On the first day of the Lunar New Year, the young people who dance the chicken carry two door chickens made of wood and papaya, and beat the gong to go to each household to celebrate the New Year, and they sing the auspicious and humorous dance chicken song, which makes the main family smile and laugh.

The host family plucks a few feathers from the chicken and puts them on their own chicken coops to pray for the prosperity of the six animals.

3, playing the flat stretcher

"The first month of pounding the hall closed Boom Boom, this year, everywhere corn abundance." This is an ancient proverb passed down by Zhuang families in Guangxi's Mashan, Du'an, Shanglin and Xincheng.

The playing of the flat-bellied is a kind of sports activities developed and evolved from the Zhuang production labor, but also the traditional recreational activities of the Zhuang family, in ancient times, every year after the autumn harvest, people with trees dug into the trough (also useful for stone troughs), troughs injected with paddy rice. Use a wooden pestle and mortar to tsubaki the grain. Five people stand on each side, men and women standing between them. In Tsubaki beating, the sides of the trough are occasionally struck, making a rhythmic pounding sound.

During the Spring Festival the whole village has to go to Hating to worship the gods with pigs, chickens and fish as offerings, and go home to worship the ancestors. When the year watch, must be in front of the ancestor tablets, placed on the white potatoes one party can sleep.

5, knocking gongs and drums

According to the aquatic calendar, the twelfth day of the first month for the "end of the festival", that is, "New Year's Day" means. On the night of the festival, a party is held in the village where young men and women sing and dance to the sound of gongs, drums and suona. There are many types of gongs and drums used at the festival, the largest being more than one meter in diameter and weighing one to two hundred kilograms.

The drums are painted with floral motifs and carved with reliefs, making them both folkloric music and handicrafts. The main activities are rituals and horse races. Water calendar New Year's Eve and the first day of the two meals connected to avoid meat and vegetarian, but not avoid fish and shrimp. Aquatic women bubble "fish package leek" is also the end of the festival banquet on the necessary delicacies.