What's so special about Yao Chinese New Year customs?

This is a ballad describing the Yao people's New Year's Eve. In fact, as early as the first half of the waxing moon before the twentieth has begun to "play the idea", even if it is a seed sown in the spring, but also in order to be able to have a good year, summer picking of yellow flowers, harvested in the fall of melons, are to be saved for New Year's Eve to eat. However, the real New Year's atmosphere, of course, is after the twenty-first day of the lunar month. At that time of the year, the rugged mountain roads, where few people are usually seen, are filled with laughter. After the rooster sings the first time, the mountain people who go out to the market to buy New Year's goods will hold up pine torches and march on the road to the market like a fire dragon. At dusk, the people at home still have to go along the way to pick up. The people who drive the market are not tired of traveling a hundred miles a day.

Those who stayed at home were busy grinding tofu, deep-frying fruit, wrapping lotus leaves, cleaning the front and back of the house, and posting Spring Festival couplets such as "Clean the cold door to welcome guests, and full of hot wine to congratulate the new friends" at the doorway to wait for the coming of the 30th night.

New Year's Eve is the Yao people's grandest festival, the table on this night is full of mice, deer, wild boar, chickens, frogs, cuttlefish, crabs, loaches and other delicious food, as well as meat, stuffed bean curd, mushrooms, chicken and other Yao-style food, the last dish is the chub crutch fish in the creek in front of the door. Some people's families are too poor to make three or five dishes, but they still try to make a dish called "fish", which is meant to have a surplus for years to come. Wine is sweet potato wine or rice wine. Yao people are not good at drinking white wine, nor do they drink beer, which is considered to be like horse urine. The staple food is red rice without a single grain of bud rice.

Then, the elders are grandly invited to sit on the upper seat, three drums, lit firecrackers, sacrifices to the heaven and earth, the country and the ancestors of the masters and ancestors will be open to enjoy the sweetness of a year of hard work. The first thing you need to do is to look back on the year and remember your loved ones who are far away from home and who are working outside.

After dinner, the whole family sits around the stove to observe the New Year's Eve, with the old man placing the ku, and a tung tree or palm tree burning in the stove for New Year's Eve. If you have a visitor, you will be invited to have tea and taste the homemade pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, maosu and glutinous rice fruit, and occasionally smoke a few puffs of bamboo pipe tobacco, but of course, nowadays, it is not uncommon to smoke Hilton and Greater China.

The first day of the first month of the lunar calendar is the Spring Festival, although the Yao people are only happy to celebrate the New Year, not the Spring Festival, but the first day of the day is an extremely important day of celebration. Daybreak, people will be scrambling to open the door, firecrackers, called "traveling". As long as there is a family of firecrackers ringing, the whole village are a call for a hundred responses, crackling and pulling the firecrackers to put up. All of a sudden, the valleys were shaken and birds flew. After dawn, you will see a branch of white wax tree, which symbolizes good luck and spring on earth, on every door of every house. Children then go from house to house saying auspicious words of congratulations and wealth.

Breakfast is always served with last night's leftovers, and no one is allowed to start a new pot to make a new meal, which is probably a sign of a prosperous year.

After the meal, the new year will be counted as a fresh start, the old man will come out of the "a hen hatching chicks, from last year's Lunar New Year's Eve to today's first day of the first month of the first year of the first **** hatching for how long? and other arithmetic riddles for children to guess, adults will go to visit relatives. In addition to the son-in-law, the daughter first return to the mother-in-law's home, the other relatives are not very expensive * affinity difference.

To visit relatives is to visit friends and relatives. The people who go out hand and shoulder some bamboo baskets, which are loaded with several copies of pork, eggs, rice, yellow sugar, glutinous rice and other gifts, and then over the mountains to the relatives.

If you are traveling with a child under the age of five, you will have to cross a bridge while praying, "Zaiku, come and follow me! The first thing you need to do is to ask your child to come with you to the bridge, and you'll be able to see your child's spirit. The child's spirit would not dare to cross the bridge," he said.

After arriving at a relative's house, you will secretly light incense or cigarettes, and when you reach the door, you will light a string of firecrackers to announce the good news. In this way, the host heard the sound and also rushed to light a string of firecrackers to welcome the guests into the main hall. So warm, mutual love, tea and cigarettes, hot feet to wash the dust, busy and very happy. Adults with children also have to lead their children to the shrine to pray, asking the gods to protect them and not to frighten them.

So, we stayed for three to five days, and every day the hosts poured out their treasures with good food and hospitality. The Yao people love to guess the maizi, six six smooth, seven coincidental matchmaking hilarious, often breakfast, lunch and dinner together, a drunken party.

While the Yao people are industrious, they are also the most playful. There is a folk song called "Play in the first month, play in February, do the work in March and April." Why not do it when you have nothing to do in the first month of the year when the mountains are so high and the water is so cold?

In the first month, it is a great time for young people to love each other, they use the opportunity to visit friends and relatives to find their future partner, whenever the village came to the young guests, the night by the fire will be full of people, love songs a few big bucket, each show off their ingenuity, trying to win the favor of the guests.

One year, I was blocked by a group of Yao women in a corner of the fire pit, singing "My father came to my mother, not to help me to find a lover, other people's son and daughter of two pairs of pairs, my lover in which side? The mountain song, so that I was smoked by the wood smoke, so I had to sing a "do not see the smile, * body skinny can not even ......" mountain song back to honor them.