Eating glutinous rice balls, guessing lantern riddles, setting off fireworks, and tuning dragons and lion dances are all wonderful Lantern Festival folk customs. But I have a soft spot for the Lantern Festival 20 years ago and the steaming bowl of rice balls.
I grew up in a remote mountain village, and every Lantern Festival, every household in the village would brew tofu, steamed pork, kill chickens, slaughter ducks, and worship ancestors and gods for a feast. For tangyuan, the villagers like to use it as a daily snack, and rarely put it on the dinner of the Lantern Festival as the staple food.
More than 20 years ago, after graduating from normal school, I was assigned to teach in a rural primary school far from home. I spent a winter vacation at home, and after the Lantern Festival, I had to leave home and go back to school to teach. On the first night before the Lantern Festival, my parents began to list the recipes of the Lantern Festival, which were rich in meat, stuffed tofu, and white chopped chicken. When my mother asked for my opinion with a smile on her face, I said "I want to eat rice balls", which surprised my parents. I quickly explained to my parents that eating rice balls during the Lantern Festival is one of the customs in the south, and there is a saying of "North Lantern Festival South Rice Balls", which expresses the beauty of people's family reunion, and also shows the inheritance and love of Chinese for traditional festivals, and the name of the rice balls is similar to the word reunion, symbolizing the reunion of the whole family, and also pinning people's wishes for a better life. My father listened to my explanation, scratched his gray hair, laughed twice and said, "It's still a doll who is well-informed." ”
The next day, I got up and walked to the hall to find that my father had already milled glutinous rice flour and was stir-frying peanuts and sesame seeds, and the smell filled the room. Mother said that after I said that I wanted to eat glutinous rice balls, my father found out the glutinous rice bubble overnight, and Tianma Maliang rushed to the rice mill in the market town to grind glutinous rice. I was born when my father was 46 years old, and I was the only one among my grandfather's grandchildren who was admitted to the normal school and jumped out of the farm to become a people's teacher. Hearing my mother's words, my eyes moistened. On that day, my parents and I were in the kitchen to make rice balls, make a fire, boil soup, pat ginger, put sugar, and brought a large pot of steaming rice balls to the table, and for the first time with my parents to eat rice balls, the steaming bowl of rice balls reflected the sweet smiling faces of my parents, and was also full of fatherly and maternal love.
After that, during the Lantern Festival, my father would ask my mother to prepare glutinous rice flour early, knock on the side to ask my opinion, and then make sesame filling, peanut filling, red bean filling, white-skinned, purple-skinned, yellow-skinned, all kinds of rice balls with different tastes. Every time I see me holding up a bowl and eating rice balls, my parents' faces are always filled with happy smiles, and when I see the happiness of my parents eating rice balls, the sweetness goes straight to the depths of my heart, because these round rice balls contain the strong love of my parents, which is not only sweet in my mouth, but also warm in my heart.
Author: Zhuge Baoman (the author is a member of the Chinese Micro Society).
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