Millennial culture, inheriting the essence of traditional Chinese folk customs; Travel through time and appreciate the ingenuity of Chinese intangible cultural heritage. Hello everyone, I am my uncle, let us walk into the door of traditional folk treasures and awaken the thousand-year-old memory of intangible cultural heritage.
The Spring Festival has a long history, roughly dating back to more than 2,000 BC, mainly from the sacrificial rituals of ancient times. In the last issue, I shared with you that the people realized that through the "official" appeal and "forced indoctrination" of the implementation of the Western Gregorian New Year, it would not be possible to change people's traditional thinking about the Spring Festival, so they restored the old calendar and determined the Spring Festival. The word Spring Festival is very short, but it has carried traditional Chinese culture for more than 4,000 years.
Flipping through books or browsing the web, you may find that the Chinese New Year was called "New Year's Day" in ancient times, and there is no doubt that there was no Gregorian calendar at that time, so you should not confuse the modern New Year's Day with it. The ancients regarded "yuan" as the beginning of all things, and "dan" is derived from the hieroglyphs "sun" and "horizon", which means that the sun rises from the horizon. The combination of the two words has the meaning of "the beginning of the year", and the ancients called "New Year's Day" "three yuan", that is, the yuan of the year, the yuan of the month, and the yuan of the time. Since there was no Gregorian calendar in ancient times, "New Year's Day" was naturally on the first day of the first lunar month.
After understanding the beginning and end of the "Spring Festival" and "New Year's Day", let's talk about the customs and culture of the Spring Festival. The first thing I have to say is the custom of "liquor". If we trace the traditional custom of drinking during the Spring Festival, it can be roughly traced back to the Western Zhou Dynasty. With the changes of the times, after the Qing Dynasty, drinking was also endowed with the function of emotional and social communication, and it became customary to use fine wine as a gift for the New Year during the Spring Festival.
There is such a description in Lu You's "Removing the Night Snow" in the Song Dynasty: "The north wind blows the snow at the beginning of the fourth watch, and Jiarui Tianjiao and the year are removed." Half of Tu Su was still raised, and the grass in front of the lamp wrote a peach charm. The "Tu Su" in this refers to the wine made from rhubarb, Shu pepper, bellflower, cinnamon, atractylodes, aconitum and other medicinal materials, which shows that the custom of drinking Tu Su wine during the festival was widely spread in the Tang and Song dynasties. But after all, Tusu wine is made of several herbs, although it has the effect of driving away cold and disease, but you can't drink more, you can only drink a glass at a specific time.
The ancients regarded Tusu wine as synonymous with the passage of time and the cessation of time. Because in ancient times, there was a custom that the younger ones drank it first, and the oldest people drank Tusu wine last. Su Zhe in the Song Dynasty sighed in "Except the Sun": "Every year, I finally drank Tu Su, and I didn't realize that I had been more than 70 years. Lu You also has the poem "Drink Tu Su wine, it is really eighty Weng" has been handed down. Today's Tusu wine is no longer just a symbol of New Year's wine, it has a more far-reaching humanistic significance.
After talking about drinking, let's talk about New Year's greetings. Since ancient times, there has been a custom of visiting friends on the street on the first day of the Lunar New Year, and it is no longer difficult to visit the New Year because of the convenience of transportation and the development of the network in modern society. But in ancient times, not only was time limited, but customs were also much more complicated, so how did they do a good job of "time management"?
Qing Jialu has a record: from the first day of the Lunar New Year, the clansmen kneel down to worship their elders in order according to their seniority, and then go to visit neighbors, relatives and friends. However, some relatives and friends who have never seen each other throughout the year will also come to visit the door during the Chinese New Year. At this time, each household will put a signature book at the door, and the visitors will sign their names on the list (similar to the current wedding scene to accept the gift money) and use it as the basis for returning the gift, this signature book is also called the "door book".
In ancient times, there was another way to pay New Year's greetings, which was called Feiti, which was a measure that people could achieve New Year's greetings without having to go to their homes in person. Similar to the current one, we copy and paste the New Year's greeting information and ** to friends, you read that right, the ancients have long understood the way of ** New Year's greetings. It's just that the ancients would write blessings on red letterhead and let the servants deliver them to the homes of relatives and friends on their behalf. After receiving the letterhead, it is as if they had met, and they will thank them in the same way. What I want to say here is that at that time, every household at that time would hang or stick paper bags on the door, which were specially used for receiving stickers, which were also called "blessings" or "substitute servants".
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