People in Guangxi usually call Mid-Autumn Festival "Ghost Festival". How do they celebrate?

The fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month is the traditional Mid-Autumn Festival, which was originally a festival to worship local officials. The ancients took July 15th as the birthday of local officials, so it was designated as the Mid-Yuan Festival. Later, there was a folk legend that ghosts were set in the underworld on July 15, so the Mid-Autumn Festival gradually became the "Ghost Festival". Whenever it comes to Mid-Autumn Festival,

People all over the country will celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival in different ways, because different places will have different customs. So, how do Guangxi people generally spend this Mid-Autumn Festival?

The "Ghost Festival" celebrated in Guangxi is not on the fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month, but on the fourteenth of the seventh lunar month. Why a day earlier? There is a legend here-in the past, people in Guangxi also celebrated festivals on the fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month. At the end of the Song Dynasty, there was a war in the south, and the people of Guangxi were preparing for the Mid-Autumn Festival. When they heard that the Yuan army had attacked Lingnan on a large scale, they had to mention celebrating the festival the day before to avoid war. It has continued since then.

Mid-Autumn Festival is an important festival in Guangxi. The whole festival starts from July 7 to the evening of July 14, and its process is the process of welcoming ancestors, sending them off and chasing them. In some places, ancestors are welcomed from July 7, and in some places, ancestors are welcomed on July 13, but on July 7, meals are prepared, that is, sacrifices are made; On the evening of July 14, we bid farewell to our ancestors. After the sacrifice before dinner, we will hold a farewell ceremony to our ancestors until around 10 in the evening. At the same time, we will burn the "wallet" with ancestors' names written on it (about how many generations of ancestors vary from family to family) and the "wallet" paper money of ticket holders and guides at the intersection, with rice, water and rice. In addition, some citizens have the habit of putting water lanterns on that night and letting them drift with the river to pray for our ancestors to bless the coming year. Its complicated and serious process is the most complicated festival, and it is a festival that people in Guangxi attach great importance to. In addition to the Spring Festival (Lantern Festival also belongs to the Spring Festival in the local concept, including off-year holidays), it is as important as Mid-Autumn Festival, Tomb-Sweeping Day and Dragon Boat Festival. Do Guangxi people have some special customs on January 14?

1. Eat duck,

Why do Guangxi eat ducks on Ghost Festival? There are two versions. One is that it is said that ancestors went home to visit relatives today and wanted to cross the Naihe Bridge. We can't get across without a boat. What do we do? So we send some ducks down to make them swim and bring them back. The second view is that eating ducks on Halloween can exorcise evil spirits.

2. Put grapefruit lanterns to worship the river god.

There is a custom of offering sacrifices to river gods on July 14 and 15 of the lunar calendar (putting grapefruit lights into the river at night), and the ceremony lasts about 2-3 hours. In order to worship the river god, people made a beautifully decorated hut with wooden boards, which was two meters long, more than one meter wide and one meter high, and made of colored paper. Insert candles and incense in a small paper house, and then string grapefruit into two strings dozens of meters long. Insert candles, incense and paper flags on the cut grapefruit and let it float on the water. When swimming, several young people with excellent water quality pushed a small paper house and dragged two long strings of grapefruit lamps, each wearing a grapefruit on each foot. It gets dark at night, and the grapefruit lamp is pulled from downstream to upstream, and then from upstream to downstream. It took about an hour before the activity ended.

3. entertain guests for three consecutive days,

In Laibin and Baise, apart from the Spring Festival, the Mid-Autumn Festival is one of the biggest festivals. Besides offering sacrifices, people also regard Mid-Autumn Festival as a good day to entertain guests and get together with their families. In order to make guests eat more happily, many people will start grinding flour to make cakes, steaming buns and making sesame candy about a week in advance. In Guangxi, Mid-Autumn Festival banquet is a custom, and some families will entertain relatives and friends for three days in a row. The more people entertain, the more lively the family is, and the happier and prouder people will be.