About Taizhou customs and traditional festivals

The custom of celebrating the Spring Festival and Lantern Festival in Linhai.

The customs of the Spring Festival

In Linhai, the Spring Festival usually lasts from the first day of the first month to the eighth day. This is what Zhangjiadu folks say, "You can drink clear soup over eight years old".

Before dawn on New Year's Day, firecrackers exploded. After dawn, every household puts candles to burn incense and paper money, offering tea fruits to the ancestors of heaven, earth and home.

For breakfast on New Year's Day, in the past, Chengguan ate glutinous rice and red date porridge, Dongxiang ate "longevity noodles" in coastal fishing villages, and some villagers in Northwest Village ate tofu porridge. In Du Qiao, Shangpan and other places, men make breakfast on the first day and are used to eating "vegetable head rice". On the fourth day, people prepare sacrifices, burn paper horses and paste a new "chef" called "Kitchen God".

On the first day of junior high school, there were many taboos in the past: no sweeping the floor, no pouring water on the ground, no knife, no needlework, no work, no business, no swearing, no debt collection, no fighting, and we should live in harmony even on this usual day of hatred.

The eighth day of the first month, commonly known as "Shangba", used to be the day when Zhangjiadu opened its market. On the eighth day, every household cooks rice for breakfast, which is called "Shangba rice". After the eighth day, folk New Year greetings will come to an end. However, the activities of the first month officially ended after the fourteenth day of the first month, because people "played lanterns" and "received the God of Wealth" for fourteen nights before the God of Wealth came to an end.

the Lantern Festival

Linhai people don't eat glutinous rice balls, but eat glutinous rice balls. The Lantern Festival is only fifteen, but fourteen.

According to the Records of Linhai County, Fang Guozhen, the leader of the peasant uprising at the end of Yuan Dynasty, was afraid that Zhu Yuanzhang would attack before the Lantern Festival, so he advanced the Lantern Festival by one day.

Another way of saying it is that (Qin)' s mother is a vegetarian at the new moon. In order to let her mother and her family spend the holidays together, the Lantern Festival was changed to 14.

It is also said that because Fang Guozhen's wife Dong Shi is the 14th birthday of the first month, the Lantern Festival is advanced to the evening. Others say that Qin, the top scholar of the Ming Dynasty in Linhai, celebrated the Lantern Festival ahead of schedule because he fasted on vegetarian food during the Tenth Five-Year Plan period.