What are the customs of the Cold Food Festival?

The customs of the Cold Food Festival include forbidding fire, offering sacrifices to ancestors, eating, inserting willows and having an outing.

1, no fire

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 Jiangnan Transcendent Taigong" is about the poet's behavior after 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.

Step 2 worship ancestors

The Cold Food Festival was regarded as a "wild sacrifice" from the Southern and Northern Dynasties to the Tang Dynasty. In the Tang Dynasty, it was included in Volume 87 of Kai Ethan, "Worship the maharaja below" and became one of the auspicious gifts officially recognized and advocated.

Step 3 prescribe diet

Cold food includes cold porridge, cold noodles, cold paste, green rice and porridge. Cold food offerings include noodles, snakes and rabbits, jujube cakes, refined rye, immortals, etc. There are dozens of drinks, such as spring wine, fresh tea, clear spring and sweet water.

People in southern Shanxi are used to eating bean jelly, cold noodles and cold cakes. In northern Shanxi, people are used to cooking (that is, steamed cake noodles or white noodles are cut into dice-sized squares, then dried and fried with earth) as food for the Cold Food Festival. In some mountainous areas, the whole family eats fried noodles on this day (that is, stir-fry whole grains, mix various dried fruits and grind them into noodles).

Step 4 insert willow

The symbol of the Vitamin Cold Food Festival was originally intended to remember meson's pursuit of political clarity. As early as the Northern and Southern Dynasties, there was a record in the Chronicle of Jingchu that "every family broke willow during the cold food between Jianghuai and Suzhou", and it is still popular to wear mustard flowers and wheat leaves instead of willow branches in Anhui, Suzhou and other places.

According to historical records in various places, there are some sayings, such as "willow branches are inserted into graves", "willow branches are folded into households", "willow branches are inserted into the eaves of sleeping stoves", "wearing a head or a tie", "offering Buddha gods in bottles" and "willow branches are inserted into doors", so there is a saying among the people that "Qingming (cold food) does not wear willow, and the beauty becomes bald".

Step 5 go for an outing

Sheng Xing was born in the Tang and Song Dynasties. Li Zhiyan's "What I saw in the East Valley" reads: "I swept things, and then I returned home happily with my brother, wife, relatives and deeds." In the Ming Dynasty, a brief introduction to the scenery of emperors recorded the scene of walking in Beijing: "During the Qingming Festival, people were walking, and there were thousands of tourists, passengers and pedestrians."