Spring festival.
Chen Yaohui. The year will come to an end, and thousands of miles will not return.
Tang Dai Shulun, "Except for the Night Stay at the Stone Station").
One year, the long period of human life;
Thousands of miles, the far end of the red dust world.
In this vast realm of time and space, how many gatherings and joys and sorrows, how many hopes and loneliness, who will give a heart-to-heart answer? This is the meaning of the Chinese "New Year".
The aesthetics of China, just like the standard of the five laws of the Tang Dynasty, take the grandeur and subtlety of nature, the exact and the subtle. It's common and easy to obtain, and it's subtle and hard to say. "The year is coming to an end" and "thousands of miles have not returned", the extremes of time and space seem to be as light as light and shadow, and seem to be as heavy as mountains, born in people's hearts, urging the taste of "year".
The ultimate preciousness, the ultimate worldliness, the overflowing festivity, the faint melancholy, all kinds of tastes come one after another, colorful, bizarre, and the world becomes a kaleidoscope in an instant. The harmony of the law and the relationship between the mountains and rivers are the gorgeous and exquisite folk beauty of the cultural power.
In our minds, only the Spring Festival is the year.
The name of the Spring Festival appeared after the Xinhai Revolution as a symbol of the new culture. At the beginning of the establishment of China, Mr. Sun Yat-sen announced the adoption of the Western calendar, which is commonly known as the solar calendar. The traditional Chinese calendar is known as the Xia calendar or the Old Calendar. The solar calendar year is called New Year's Day, and the big year of the summer calendar is called the Spring Festival. This measure is actually intended to replace the old calendar year with the Gregorian calendar year.
Repeatedly ordered to ban the Spring Festival holiday, perhaps for the sake of the new cultural revolution to be more thorough, but basically ineffective, in Lu Xun's words, "the end of the old calendar is most like the end of the year after all."
Chinese have always regarded New Year's Day as a concept of time, and the customs of the Spring Festival are almost a concept of life, irreplaceable, it is like the DNA deeply embedded in the national culture.
In this way, there was a "dual-track year" in China, a bizarre cultural phenomenon.
Today, the Spring Festival has become the largest and most important intangible cultural heritage of the Chinese nation, carrying the cultural accumulation of our nation for thousands of years. How powerful is it? Just look at the spring tide of billions of people every year. I remember that in 2015, there was a statistic that the national Spring Festival transportation army reached 3.7 billion people, which is equivalent to making the total population of Africa, Europe, the Americas, and Oceania move once. On average, 70 million people make journeys every day. For a Chinese and Chinese people all over the world, the Chinese New Year is not a day or a night, but a period of very strong festive atmosphere for more than a month.
Especially on the twenty-third day of the lunar month, the flavor of the New Year has become stronger and stronger. This day is commonly known as "Xiao Nian'er", which is an important day in the Spring Festival culture. There is a big event on this day, that is, to sacrifice the stove and send the stove prince to heaven. The whole of China starts from this day and counts down to the New Year.
Regarding the Lord of the Stove, it is said that he was sent to the world during the Wei and Jin dynasties, one per household, and specially monitored people's every move. On the twenty-third day of the lunar month, report to the Emperor of Heaven, and the Heavenly Court will bring good and bad fortune and implement rewards and punishments in the new year according to people's good and evil behavior.
Before the Wei and Jin dynasties, the god of the stove was the god who managed the food and drink of the world. After the Wei and Jin dynasties, the folk sacrifice to the god of the stove looked like a kind of bribery, praying that the god of the stove would go to heaven to say more good things, don't say bad things, or even seal your mouth with stove sugar, so don't say anything. Fan Chengda of the Song Dynasty had a poem "Sacrificial Stove Words": "Send the king drunk and full to the gate of heaven, the ladle is long and the ladle is short, and the clouds are not restored, and the begging is to return to the city." This "Fan Ye" is even better, he not only asks Zao Jun to gossip less, but also hopes that he will ask for some rewards and come back to share with us.
In the past, at least before the "Cultural Revolution", almost every household in the rural areas of Northeast China provided stoves for the prince. The so-called stove prince is a wooden board painting, pasted behind the pot, smoked and burned all day long. Some people don't clean it often, and the dust on the fence is in a bunch, swaying with the water vapor of the cauldron, falling into the pot or hanging on the face of the stove king. is such a "buried master" who has endured hardships, and during the "Cultural Revolution", he broke the four olds, but he bore the brunt. I heard that at the university where I studied, there was a department leader who was criticized, and one of the charges was for the prince of the stove. It turned out that he felt that the Spring Festival in the city lacked the flavor of the New Year, so he specially bought a stove for the prince, and wanted the children to experience what "New Year's flavor" was, but it turned out to be ironclad evidence for promoting feudal superstition.
There have been many stories about the sacrificial stove for thousands of years. The most tragic thing is that Lu Meng of the Song Dynasty is burning poems to sacrifice to the king of the stove. This Mr. Lu was poor in his early years, and in order to sacrifice the stove, he counted two taels of meat on credit to the butcher shopkeeper. When the butcher came back and found out, he was furious and chased after the Lu family to ask for meat. At this time, the meat was already in the pot, and the butcher reached out to scoop it up. Mr. Lu sighed again and again, so he had to use poetry as a gloss and burn poems to sacrifice to the stove: "A stick of fragrance and a wisp of smoke, the stove is facing the sky today." If the Jade Emperor asks about human affairs, it is worthless for Taoist articles. "Maybe Zao Jun was moved and said good things for him, so he later became the prime minister and became a generation of famous ministers.
Analyzing the psychology of the sacrificial stove, most of it is to pray for blessings, and it is not excluded that people are not very confident about their own cultivation, so they implement trusteeship.
This is also because the concept of good and evil is very important in their hearts, and they are full of fear of the gods. The ancients said "cautious independence", in fact, those saints and gentlemen who have achieved cautious independence, when they are alone, how can they not use their own hearts, facing heaven and earth, full of awe. The seemingly superstitious sacrificial activities allow people to complete a careful inner contemplation, which will be beneficial to people's self-improvement. From this point of view, the customs that have not been broken for thousands of years will have more or less materialistic roots. Just like my hometown kills pigs around Laba, it is also the coldest time in the Northeast, which is close to the Spring Festival and easy to preserve.
The customs and habits of the Chinese New Year are slightly different in various parts of China, and they are basically the same.
Take my hometown in the northeastern countryside as an example, after the new year, the first thing is to do a lot of hygiene. Sprinkle and sweep the indoor dust, so that the windows are bright and clean. Clothes, curtains, bedspreads, bedding, etc., should be washed. The time for individuals to take a bath can be later, and not later than the thirtieth day of the lunar month. These are the things that even lazy people have to do.
During this period, you also have to grind tofu, sprinkle rice cakes, and steam sticky bean buns, and after they are done, put them in the warehouse to freeze them, and you can eat them until the end of the first month. This kind of prepared food can save a lot of cooking time for leisure and entertainment activities during the New Year.
Two or three days before Chinese New Year's Eve, every family began to put up window flowers and New Year pictures, and took red paper to ask people with good calligraphy in the village to write Spring Festival couplets.
There is another major event on the twenty-eighth day of the lunar month, that is, shaved frozen meat. In the rural areas of Northeast China, after Laba kills the New Year's pigs, in addition to inviting the whole village to have a full meal, the rest will be unloaded, choose a corner of the yard to block the light, pave and cover it with clean snow, and then bring clean water from the well, sprinkle it on it repeatedly, and freeze into a small iceberg. This keeps you fresher than any refrigerator. On the 28th day of the lunar month, a part of the frozen meat should be shaved out, a few pieces should be taken out and put on the case to dissolve, and the ingredients should be prepared for the Chinese New Year's Eve dinner.
Ordinary farmers don't see meat a few times a year, and when there is suddenly so much pork in front of them, you can imagine how happy you are. Children, in particular, have bright eyes and circle around the table. Children don't know how to cook, but they have a lot of imagination, and their little wings leap through every link at once. Looking at the fresh meat drooling, who can have this consciousness as an adult?
Northeast people cook meat, as long as the big iron pot can fit it, they are not afraid of big pieces. When the pork is cooked, the smell of the New Year can finally be smelled.
In my memory, the clearest smell of the New Year is the smell of rolling peppercorns. Recalling my childhood, I feel that many homes in the village do not have special panels, but almost every family has two large cabinets, which are usually purchased by parents when they get married, and are used to store important items. The large cabinet is made of solid wood, about one meter high, fifty or sixty centimeters wide, and the length should not be less than one meter five. The two cabinet lids that can be lifted, and when they are removed, the inside is facing up, which is a panel, which can be used to roll out the dumpling wrappers. The cabinet lid at home is used to crush the peppercorns every year, lay them flat on the clay kang, use a wine bottle, divide about two or three taels of dried peppercorns, divide them into several parts, and push them back and forth on the cabinet lid until they are broken into powder. In the crisp sound of kaka, the house is full of the fragrance of peppercorns, and the busy family members walking back and forth will also be stained with some, a bit like the smell of ancient books or traditional Chinese medicine.
Du Mu said in "A Fang Gong Fu": "The smoke is oblique and foggy, and the pepper orchid is also burned." In ancient times, pepper and orchid were very luxurious aromatherapy materials. To this day, when I think of the Chinese New Year, I will remember the aroma of peppercorns that permeate the house.
These preparations before the year are all in order, which one comes first, which one comes last, and each family has a reasonable arrangement. If you encounter something you don't understand, you can ask the elders in the village and well-informed people for advice. A lot of knowledge will also be useful in the year that follows. As the saying goes, a fool looks at his neighbors during the New Year, and his life is often like this, and the role model is around.
In the village, if there are people with poor ability to manage their families, or people with financial difficulties, relatives and neighbors will not read jokes, and there are always people who send some rice, flour, oil, salt, cooked food, or help in person. I remember when I was a child, my parents would always send us to visit so-and-so's house, and they wouldn't say anything, and when we came back, we would always ask carefully.
The busy year enhances the harmony between relatives and neighbors, and the joy of the New Year also stirs up the kindness and fraternity in people's hearts. During the Chinese New Year, seeing people suffering or being in a bad mood cannot be ignored by people in the Northeast.
The most important moment of the Spring Festival is Chinese New Year's Eve, which is the Chinese New Year's Eve that begins with dinner on the 30th day of the lunar month. Every house, the best dishes, will be displayed on the dinner table. This is the Chinese New Year's Eve dinner, which is the highlight of Chinese Spring Festival culture and is indispensable.
The traditional old Beijing Chinese New Year's Eve dinner must have "water chestnut", which means "must qi". It can be seen that family reunion is the biggest value orientation of the Chinese New Year's Eve dinner. "If you have money or not, go home for the New Year" is the most concentrated embodiment of the Chinese clan concept and family concept.
The family sits together, and the happiest thing is reunion. This meal, which is also a dinner with the ancestral gods, is an opportunity for family members to identify with each other and communicate with each other, and it is very sacred. If those who return to their hometowns from other places fail to come back in time, it will become the biggest regret of the whole family.
The Chinese New Year's Eve dinner is the most sumptuous of the year, and the dishes are often so many that they cannot be eaten for several days. Good thing it's cold and easy to store. Some people like back to the pot meat and stew, why do they like the taste? At the end of the day, it's all about the taste memory of Chinese New Year's Eve leftovers, starting at an early age. The things that are accepted in happiness can always be remembered.
After the Chinese New Year's Eve dinner, it is entertainment time for the family. All the chores are done and everyone can sit down and rest. Once upon a time in the countryside, the brazier was the center of the whole family. The oldest elder and youngest junior are closest to the brazier. Nowadays, every house has a sofa, which is wide and long, and it is very comfortable. But when I sit, I always feel that the pattern is a bit loose and not popular. Comparatively, the heating is very strong than the brazier, but I still miss the brazier very much, the warmth that made people sleepy.
Nowadays, all over the country, they are basically guarding the TV and the Spring Festival Gala of the first station. This is also the most comfortable and joyful time for Chinese.
After 10 o'clock in the evening, people in the Northeast will start setting off firecrackers and cooking dumplings. Whether in the city or in the countryside, almost suddenly, firecrackers from near and far are ringing in unison. At this time, the whole of China, regardless of the north and the south, the people of all ages, were immersed in the excitement of the festival. It seems that everyone wants to give their joy to others and send it to all directions. The so-called birdsong and deer song, the same festival, the same tune, the same sound, it is easier for people to feel the same celebration and the people and things.
The history of firecrackers can be traced back to 2,000 years ago. At first, a piece of bamboo is heated to make it sweat, and then it quickly falls to the steps with a popping sound, which is called a firecracker. In the Song Dynasty, gunpowder and firecrackers appeared, and the sound was even louder. Myths and legends have it that there is a monster that specifically attacks humans on Chinese New Year's Eve, and the only thing it fears is the sound of firecrackers. I think it may be that in ancient times, it was sparsely populated, and out of fear of the night, it made a loud noise. So why don't you usually use firecrackers? Usually everyone doesn't go out of the house, the sunrise works, the sunset rests, and there is no need. Occasionally out of the house, do people who are greedy for black affairs use firecrackers? Everyone else is sleeping, you set off firecrackers, crackling, aren't you looking for scolding? It is estimated that even if you are afraid of the dark, you have to hold on, which is called the minority obeying the majority.
Now that I think about it, the memories of childhood and even teenagers about the Spring Festival, the ** of firecrackers far exceeds the desire for food. The dreams of the year are in the explosion of the midnight crackling ** on Chinese New Year's Eve. At that time, the dumplings had been wrapped, and my father patted off the flour in his hand and put down a kang table in the courtyard, on which offerings and incense were placed. A bonfire was lit not far away, and right next to this bonfire, the unpacked firecrackers had been laid out. In the early years, the so-called fireworks and firecrackers were nothing more than "two kicks" (also called double rings), a 200-ring cannon battle, and some gadgets such as "drilling monkeys", "throwing cannons", flying saucers and so on. When I was a little younger, I could only cover my ears and watch my father and brother set off firecrackers. At that time, the "two kicks" were very safe, they were carried by hand, the first one exploded in the hand, and the second one exploded in mid-air. Firecrackers are the busiest time of the year, when everyone gathers in the yard to watch the fireworks in the sky.
After the firecrackers were set off, we, the seven or eight-year-old children, carried papier-mâché lanterns from house to house to pick up the unexploded firecrackers, put them in our pockets, and took them out to show off in front of the children when we had nothing to do. It is also often used to scare girls, and it looks silly to throw one in front of them and turn around and run. Some of the older naughty boys would tie a small whip to the tail of a pig or a dog, and watch the wolf run to the pig after lighting it, and sometimes it would ignite the firewood and straw stack, and be beaten violently by the adults.
Now all this is a distant memory, and now the children in the city can only listen to it as a fairy tale.
In the past Spring Festival, what impressed me more was the beautiful singing of Li Guyi's "Unforgettable Tonight". "Shenzhou Wanli embraces the same arms, and wishes for the good of the motherland, the good of the motherland! "This is the best interpretation of contemporary Chinese New Year culture.
The custom of eating dumplings on Chinese New Year's Eve was already prevalent in the Ming and Qing dynasties. The dumplings are to be wrapped by 10:30 p.m., the firecrackers go off, and the dumplings are put into the pot. Because the new year, which is the first day of the first lunar month, starts at 11:00 p.m. at midnight. The so-called Tianjiaozi is the time when the old year and the new year are replaced, and the homonym of dumplings is exactly the same as Jiaozi, so there is the meaning of changing the age of Jiaozi.
According to the old custom, the New Year's greetings between family members and the New Year's money for children are all after the firecrackers go off and before eating dumplings.
On the morning of the first day of the first lunar month, the first thing is to paste the Spring Festival couplets, and after breakfast, I start to visit the relatives of the same sect to pay New Year's greetings. The order of New Year's greetings begins with the person with the highest rank, which is in line with the etiquette of auspicious affairs. On the second day of the first lunar month, the husband will accompany his daughter-in-law back to her parents' house and bring gifts to her father-in-law and mother-in-law. Newlywed daughters are generally in the third year of junior high school. Why does the newlywed daughter return to her parents' house a day late? This is probably because the new daughter-in-law has just arrived, and in order to establish a better interpersonal relationship in the new family, she should assist her mother-in-law in completing housework and paying New Year's greetings to important elders, and the etiquette should be sufficient. Would it be okay to go home a day later? The husband's family needs to consider the relationship between the son and the parents-in-law, and take into account the other party's mood of looking forward to seeing the daughter, so it is not good to be late, and it is not good to be early. Prevailing etiquette is the result of the most compromise of weighing people's hearts.
Spring Festival couplets must be pasted after sunrise on the first day of the Lunar New Year and before lunch. "In the sound of firecrackers, the spring breeze sends warmth into Tusu. Thousands of households always replace the new peach with the old one. "Wang Anshi's poem "Yuan Ri" is well-known to the people and familiar to Chinese.
Spring Festival couplets are a unique festival culture in China, which originated from the peach charm of the ancients to say goodbye to the old and welcome the spring. The names of the two gods, Shen Tu and Yu Lei, are engraved on the peach wood board and hung on both sides of the main gate to ward off evil spirits and pray for blessings. During the period of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms, the Later Shu Emperor Meng Chang wrote two sentences on the peach charm: "New Year's Yuqing, Jiajie Changchun" two sentences of battle. Literary and historical scholars have always believed that this is the earliest Spring Festival couplet. Until the Dunhuang testament unearthed in the Mogao Caves, people found that the earlier Spring Festival couplets were two sentences written by Liu Qiuzi of the Tang Dynasty in the eleventh year of Kaiyuan (723): "The beginning of the three yangs, the beginning of the four prefaces". This is 240 years earlier than the Spring Festival couplets of Houshu. In the early years of the Ming Dynasty, due to Zhu Yuanzhang's vigorous advocacy, the New Year's inscription and pasting of Spring Festival couplets developed into a nationwide cultural activity. Since then, the number of spring couplets has increased, and the form has become more and more refined.
Spring couplets, also known as couplets and pairs, must be nouns to nouns, verbs to verbs. "Heaven to earth, rain to wind, continent to sky. Mountain flowers to sea trees, red sun to the sky. And so on, the parts of speech are the same, and the meaning of the words is relative. Words in the same position in the upper and lower sentences must have opposite tones. It is also a three-** theory, two, four, and six distinct, and the tone of the law must be rescued, and the meaning of the two sentences cannot be too close, and if it is too close, it will be guilty of the problem of "gassho". In short, it abides by the rules of the Tang Dynasty's five-seven-character poetry couplet.
Regardless of whether people in the Northeast are rich or poor, they must stick a pair for the New Year.
In the past, many literati and calligraphers made their mark by writing pairs to their neighbors when they were young. This is also the reason for my love of calligraphy. My father is a teacher in the village school, and he is responsible for writing Spring Festival couplets for dozens of families in the village every year. At first, I watched the excitement and started to do it, but when I was twelve or thirteen years old, I took over the job from my father until I was admitted to university and left my hometown.
There are many elderly people in the countryside who can't read, and sometimes I have to go to my home to help them paste the couplets well, but it is a trivial matter to make a mistake in the upper and lower couplets. Such jokes have happened more than once before. More than 20 years have passed, and I have always had a wish in my heart to go back to my hometown to write Spring Festival couplets for the villagers before the year, but unfortunately I am very busy every year.
Many customs during the Spring Festival arose in the childhood of our nation. From the current point of view, it may feel naïve, naïve, and even absurd. In fact, the customs of the ancients, almost everything, have their basis in real life. For example, worshipping ancestors is essentially a kind of return for the love of the ancestors. Worship is essentially a good expectation of future life. The rules of the various rituals correspond to the rational order of practical life. Every festival, every custom, in our emotional river, is an island and a bridge of past life.
Out of the first month, even in the north, the weather is starting to warm up. The snow on the eaves of the city's buildings began to melt and flow. The dripping water dripping on the stone steps is particularly tranquil compared to the firecrackers and fireworks not long ago. And a grand spring, it is in such an atmosphere that it is quietly coming. (Poetry and white).