Lantern Festival has always been highly valued by the people. During the Lantern Festival, in addition to watching lanterns, eating Yuanxiao and solve riddles on the lanterns, people will also have colorful entertainment activities such as singing and dancing, dragon dancing, lion playing, walking on stilts, yangko dancing and roller boating, which are comparable to the Spring Festival. Therefore, people are used to calling a series of entertainment activities during the Lantern Festival "Lantern Festival".
Lantern Festival is celebrated on the fifteenth day of the first month
Kaiping Folk Lantern Festival is used to cooking dumplings. Some people sang: "I like to eat Yuanxiao pills, and every family celebrates reunion." Tangyuan symbolizes reunion and good luck. Tangyuan is usually made by kneading glutinous rice flour into pills and cooking them in water. There are sweet and salty tangyuan. When making sweet glutinous rice balls, Kaiping people are used to putting a little ginger in sugar water, which has a unique fragrance.
On the Lantern Festival every year, there are dragon and lion dances, solve riddles on the lanterns and other recreational activities in Kaiping, the hometown of overseas Chinese.
The dragon dance in Kaiping is quite distinctive, with different images, such as cloth dragon, sarong, paper dragon and grass dragon, which are generally made of bamboo, wood, paper, cloth and straw. When I was a child, I watched the dancing grass dragon on the Lantern Festival night. The big grass dragon made of straw was about three or four feet long. The dragon was fitted with some candles, which curled up in piles for a while and floated for a while, giving people an ethereal and mysterious feeling.
let's talk about lion dancing. The lion's head painting in Kaiping generally represents Guan Gong and Zhang Fei in red and black respectively, and there is also a difference between a literary lion and a martial lion. The lion is the king of beasts, and it is also the auspicious beast in folklore, so it is very popular. During the Spring Festival and Lantern Festival, teams of lions walk through the streets and go door-to-door to congratulate people on the New Year, in order to show that the lions are lucky and happy. In order to attract a lion, the shops in the market town always set up a "green" at the door (that is, lettuce is wrapped in a red envelope, and there is money in the red envelope), so that the lion can worship and dance to the sound of firecrackers and drums, and leave with a "green", which is called "picking green"
Lantern Festival solve riddles on the lanterns is elegant and a folk custom in Kaiping. In ancient China, riddles were also called "Yu Ci" and "argot". Both "Yu" and "Yin" mean hiding. In the Southern Song Dynasty, people in Hangzhou put riddles on the blue gauze lanterns during the Lantern Festival, so the name "lantern riddle" came into being. What people say about lantern riddles now is actually riddles, which are not necessarily attached to lamps. Solve riddles on the lanterns, a folk lantern festival in Kaiping, is pasted on the wall or hung on a rope. When I was a child, I participated in the Lantern Festival solve riddles on the lanterns in the village, which was very interesting. At that time, the riddle was posted on the wall, and whoever guessed correctly could get a candy. We greedy children often think hard about eating candy, and once we guess right, we jump for joy. Looking back now, I still think solve riddles on the lanterns is very interesting.