What are the customs of the Spring Festival

"Wear new clothes, put up Spring Festival couplets, and buy firecrackers with your New Year's money." Spring Festival is the most characteristic traditional festival in China. The flavor of Chinese New Year is the flavor that makes people most attached to it. Do you know what are the customs of Spring Festival?

1, posting Spring Festival couplets

Spring Festival couplets, also known as door pairs, spring stickers, couplets, couplets, peach symbols, etc., which depicts the background of the times and expresses the good wishes with neat, pairwise, concise and exquisite words, is a unique form of literature in China. Every Spring Festival, whether urban or rural, every family should select a large red Spring Festival couplets pasted on the door, for the festival to increase the festive atmosphere. This custom began in the Song Dynasty, began to prevail in the Ming Dynasty, to the Qing Dynasty, the Spring Festival couplets of ideology and artistry have been greatly improved, Liang Zhangzhu prepared the Spring Festival couplets monograph "Threshold Lian series of words" on the origins of the couplets and various types of works of the characteristics of the discussion.

There are different accounts of the origin of the spring couplets, one of which is that they originated from peach symbols. When the ancients celebrated the old year and welcomed the new year, they would draw or write the names of the two immortals "Shentian" and "Yubi" on peach wood boards, and hang and post them on doors to pray for good luck and avoid disasters. From the Song Dynasty onwards, peach charms with sentences written on them became popular. The Song poem, "Always changing the new peach for the old one," is a proof of this. Then when did paper spring scrolls rise in popularity? It was during the Ming and Qing Dynasties. After a thousand years of evolution, the Spring Festival couplets have changed forms and names, but what remains unchanged is the good wishes it carries.

2, dust

According to "Lv's Spring and Autumn Annals", China in the era of Yao and Shun, there is a Spring Festival dust custom. According to Chinese folklore: because "dust" and "Chen" homophonic, the New Year dust sweeping has "in addition to the meaning of Chen to welcome the new", the intention is to put all the "poor luck" and "poor luck", "the", "the", "the", "the", "the", "the", "the", "the", "the", "the" and "the". ", "bad luck" all sweep out the door, inside and outside are clean.

3, hanging lanterns

Lanterns, also known as "lights", it has a long history. According to archaeologists, the Chinese lantern is the world's earliest invention of portable lighting tools. Later, the lantern became a symbol of festivity in the hearts of the Chinese people, with good omens of family reunion, prosperity, red-hot, happiness and light.

4, New Year's Eve dinner

New Year's Eve night, the whole family gathered to drink soundly, *** to enjoy the joy of family. Northern regions in the New Year's Eve have the custom of eating dumplings, dumplings is the practice of the first and noodles, and the word is together; dumplings and dumplings and cross harmonized, and cross and cross the meaning of getting together, but also to take more years of cross the meaning of the child. New Year's Eve dumplings are usually wrapped before 12:00 p.m., to be eaten at night when the time comes, because this is the beginning of the first day of the first month of the lunar calendar. In the south, it is customary to eat rice cakes on New Year's Day. The sweet and sticky rice cakes symbolize the sweetness of the new year's life and a high step.

5, the New Year's Eve

New Year's Eve is one of the most important New Year's Eve activities, the custom of the New Year's Eve has a long history. The earliest records are found in the Western Jin Dynasty Zhou Zhi's "customs": the night of New Year's Eve, each with the gift, known as "feed the year"; wine and food invited, known as the "other year"; young and old get together to drink, wishing to complete, known as the "sub year"; all night long to keep watch. "; we stay up all night, waiting for the dawn, called "keep the year". Since the Han Dynasty, the time of the transition between the old and the new year is usually the middle of the night.

6, the new year's money

Elders send the new year's money is the favorite part of the children! It is said that during the Song Dynasty, people would use a tray box to hold fruit and food as a New Year's Eve plate for the younger generation. Later on, the New Year's money basically replaced the New Year's plate. I'm sure we've all heard the legend of the New Year's Beast, and it's believed that if the beast attacks on New Year's Eve, the money can be used to "bribe" it and keep the children safe.

7, the Lantern Festival

The 15th day of the first month to eat Lantern Festival, "Lantern Festival" as a food, in China has a long history. Song Dynasty, the folk that is popular a Lantern Festival to eat novelty food. This food, the earliest called "floating Yuanzi" after the "Lantern", the businessman also beautifully called "Yuanbao".

Yuanxiao that "dumplings" to sugar, rose, sesame, bean paste, yellow cinnamon, walnuts, nuts, jujube paste, etc. for the filling, wrapped in glutinous rice flour into a round, meat can be vegetarian, with different flavors. It can be boiled in soup, deep-fried or steamed, and has the meaning of reunion.

The Spring Festival is an ancient festival in China, and one of the most important festivals of the year. In the course of thousands of years of historical development, it has formed a number of fixed customs and habits, many of which have been passed down to the present day. May we keep these customs in our hearts and pass them on from generation to generation, full of love and good wishes.