New Year's Memory
The Lantern Festival in the Year of the Dragon is coming, and I searched for a circle in the morning about the Lantern Festival activities, which are nothing more than watching the lantern exhibition, eating glutinous rice balls, Lantern Festival blessings, and the Lantern Festival of the ancients.
When we were young, the Lantern Festival was interesting.
During the Lantern Festival, spring ploughing has not begun, many people who go out to work have not left home, children have not yet started school, and every household will make a sumptuous dinner.
Before the feast, it should be like the day of the Spring Festival, with a special sense of ritual crackling and setting off a lively firecracker, and the banquet can only be opened after the firecracker.
In my memory, we children are all in a hurry, absent-minded, all we want is to finish eating quickly, and ask our friends to go outside to play with lanterns.
After dinner, flaming red lanterns will appear in the streets. Children carry lanterns in groups, chirping, like elves in the night.
If it is a cloudy day, in the dark night, the lanterns are more festive; If it's a sunny day, the moonlight of the fifteenth day can illuminate the village as if it were day, and when you walk on the road, you can see shadows walking around with you.
When I was a child, there were only paper lanterns, and they were all adults in their busy lives, taking the time to tie up the frame with sorghum stalks, and then paste the paper on the sorghum stalks with paste. Some ingenious adults will also tie lanterns into various shapes, such as some cute little animals, or draw beautiful patterns on paper.
Whether it is simple or exquisite, it is all the thoughts of children from the New Year to the Lantern Festival.
Paper lanterns need to be lit with candles, and even if there is no wind, the small flame is like a restless little head at night, always wanting to look around. Pick up the lantern with a candle, be careful, otherwise the flame will be crooked if it accidentally shakes, maybe the paper lantern will burn, and then there will be no play.
Among children, it is also popular to touch lanterns. When lanterns collide, you have to touch other people's candles first to extinguish or burn, and at the same time ensure that your own lanterns are intact, and you are the winner.
After the Lantern Festival dinner, the main street of the village is crowded, and from time to time some people start a children's lantern touching competition, and the adults cheer on the side, fight to the thrilling place, excitedly teach their children to touch the lanterns, and even want to go into battle in person. The cheers, screams, and shouts are comparable to a morning market.
I remember one year, the adults tied a lantern to my younger brother who had just been able to walk, and the younger brother's physiognomy was a chicken, and the shape of the lantern was still a big rooster with high morale.
My sister took my brother and I to fight all the lanterns on the street, and they have not been extinguished, becoming the most dazzling presence on the street that day.
When I was a child, the paper lanterns that lit candles were much more fun than the plastic lanterns that used batteries, sang and flashed, and never went out.
Another memorable Lantern Festival activity is the setting off of fireworks.
After dinner, the villages scrambled to start setting off fireworks. At night, fireworks erupt in distant villages, interspersed with the sound of firecrackers. This is the end of the year.
Everyone enjoyed while walking, and evaluated which village's fireworks were good-looking, and the long time of the fireworks was long, which means that the economic conditions of the village are good, and the villagers have earned money.
Some families are just for this competition, and the collective sense of honor is bursting, and the fireworks in the neighboring villages have to be set off for a longer time.
When I was a child, there was another thing that was very magical, adults could always predict the weather of the Lantern Festival, and it was very accurate. Their method is to determine the weather on the 15th day of the first month of this year based on the weather on the 15th day of August last year, that is, "the weather on the 15th day of August will be the 15th day of the first month next year."
At that time, I thought it was a feudal superstition of adults, and the so-called weather on August 15 confirmed the weather on the 15th day of the first month of the next year, which was just a coincidence. I didn't know until recently,".The clouds cover the moon on the fifteenth day of August, and the snow lights up on the fifteenth day of the first monthThere is a scientific basis.
This is because there is a corresponding rhythm relationship between the weather, and the rhythm refers to the fact that after a certain kind of weather appears, it corresponds to the corresponding weather that will appear several days in the future.
The length of this rhythm varies from 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, 120 days, 150 days, 180 days, and 240 days.
August 15 clouds cover the moon, the first month 15 snow lights up" according to the lunar calendar, exactly 150 days of rhythm.
The weather is like an orchestra, wind, clouds, rain, snow, thunder, lightning, fog, frost, as if this band plays a piece of music. And this movement also has its own "sense of rhythm", with treble, bass, and loops.
As soon as the Lantern Festival passes, the year is completely over.
Children start school, adults go out to work, old people go to the fields for spring ploughing, and spring is coming leisurely.