Author: Lin Zewen

Every year in March, May and July of the lunar calendar in Chaoshan area, many families organize "going out of the garden" for children over the age of 15. The organizers of this activity are usually parents and grandparents. Although Chaoshan areas have their own characteristics, they are similar. The specific meaning of "leaving the garden" is a ceremony for children to bid farewell to childhood and enter adulthood. This ceremony has been circulating in Chaoshan area for a long time. With the changes of the times and the renewal of people's concepts, this ceremony is also changing.

"Going out of the garden", for everyone who has experienced it, the deepest impression is the food at the garden ceremony. Every year, many children around us step out of their childhood and walk out of their own childhood gardens. When they walk out of this garden, their parents will prepare a table of "out of the garden" meals for them. After using this rich meal, they will also walk out of the garden and enter the adult world outside the garden. So, what exactly is this sumptuous meal like? What is its profound meaning?

As the date of "going out of the garden" approaches, parents are busy choosing new clothes and preparing garden meals for their children. On the morning of the day when they leave the garden, the children wear new clothes and sit at the table to enjoy the garden meal prepared by their parents in advance. This breakfast is mainly pig viscera, including pig intestines, stomachs, livers, kidneys and hearts. After the viscera are boiled into soup, sugar is added. After eating these viscera, parents will tell their children that at the age of 15, they should abandon dirty things, update their viscera and grow up quickly. Breakfast with so many pig offal is probably rare in people's life. In the traditional consciousness, the five viscera and six viscera of animals correspond to those of people, and you can make up whatever you eat. Parents also hope that their children can change their internal organs and grow up healthily after eating pig offal on this day. In addition, some places will also prepare a fish and fat white pork, and children must hold a fish head and a fish tail with chopsticks, which means doing things with a beginning and a tail, and then eating a piece of fat pork, symbolizing wealth for a long time. The most sumptuous meal is Chinese food. This sumptuous lunch focuses on 12 dishes. It is also at this lunch that children aged 15 enter the ranks of adults, sit at the table as adults and become the protagonists on the table. This meal can be said to be the climax of "going out of the garden". Eating meat, three birds' eggs, thick meat, green garlic, celery, etc. means that you will be "Liuhe" everywhere in the future, be kind to others and live in harmony. Green garlic means that when you grow up, you can be smart and smart, and celery symbolizes that you will become rich through hard work and thrifty housekeeping. The protagonist in this meal is a whole chicken. The head of the chicken must be pointed at the 15-year-old child, and no one is allowed to move. Then the child "bites" the head of the chicken and eats the chicken. Its moral is to get ahead and achieve something in the future.

With the gradual change of people's living standards and ideas, the traditional ceremony of "going out of the garden" has not been forgotten. Many parents attach great importance to their children's once-in-a-lifetime "going out of the garden", but the changes of the times have led people to look for more direct and still symbolic ceremonies, such as simplifying the ceremony. Although the garden meal has far-reaching significance, it is a form after all, and many parents will try their best to make it more suitable for their children's tastes without wasting it. Some parents choose to go to hotels and restaurants to let their children have a delicious garden feast.

From the garden meal to the garden banquet, the meaning of "going out of the garden" has not fundamentally changed, but parents' ideas are changing, and they begin to choose restaurants such as hotels to prepare for this ceremony, so that their children can have a lively adult ceremony. And some hotels in the city have long been aiming at this market, and have launched their own garden banquet packages. For example, some hotels have launched "special banquets" to promote the gradual upgrading of the "out of the garden" consumer market by launching garden banquets with good color significance for consumers.