The new year, naturally, begins at the time past New Year's Eve.

But the custom is usually to open the door to welcome the new year when the star rises in the sky. The firecrackers go off in every house. The air is full of firecrackers phosphorus nitrate flavor, the wind blowing in the face, but also warm, not like winter so cold. After the firecrackers bombed the ground full of crumbs of red paper, must use baskets in the back of the house, that can not be treated as garbage, that is the joy of the New Year.

On the first day of the New Year, according to the custom is in the home to pray for blessings, serving parents. In the center of the hall set up a small table, the table must be clean. On the table are three animals: chicken, meat and fish, representing good luck, wealth and surplus. Next to it is a small red paper bag. In the incense burner full of rice, a pair of red candles are lit and three joss sticks are lit. Firecrackers explode near the door, and the men, women and children of the family kowtow to the table in turn, praying for the safety of their families and the prosperity of their homes. The children ran to pick up the unexploded firecrackers.

The red paper packets on the offering table are wrapped in tea leaves. These tea leaves, blessed by the spirits of the ancestors, can bless the family with peace and health. Therefore, a cup of tea offering will be religiously brewed for each family member to drink.

New Year's festivals, go out regardless of who you see, greetings must be simple and loud sentence "you have a lively year! And the other side will also be naive and rubbed his hands together to agree: "Your place is also more lively!" The tea served to guests is also different from the usual. Every family has fried sesame seeds and beans, and crushed ginger. Guests to come, will be in the cup put a handful of sesame and a few cooked beans, put some ginger, pick some salt, and tea together with boiling water into ginger tea. Warm a cup in the hand, drinking tea at the same time, you can get rid of cold food, sesame seeds and beans chewing is full of flavor.

On the second day of the Lunar New Year, married men are required to bring their cousins and a new suit of clothes to the house of their mother-in-law to pay homage to the New Year. The grandmother is busy opening boxes and cupboards and pouring jars, taking out all kinds of novelty and delicious snacks to entertain the "granddogs". There were fruit candies, wick cakes, cool cakes, and persimmon cakes that were bought in the market before the New Year. There are home-grown peanuts, sunflower seeds, date cakes, sweet potato chips. Those big sweet oranges and kumquats on the tip of the tree are specially reserved for the grandchildren, and at this time they are busy asking people to carry ladders and build stools to pick them down. The red-fleshed glazes and oranges are picked after the frost, and the selected ones are layered with pine fir branches and leaves, and maintained in a bright and shiny condition.

This day's lunch, but also because there is a son-in-law and grandson for the first time in the new year, about the daughter of the family's decency, often do more than the New Year's Eve dinner. The first thing you need to do is to make sure that you have a good meal, and that you have the right kind of food. The big grass carp that had been kept in the water tank before the New Year's Eve must be fished out and dissected on the same day. The chickens and ducks in the roost were also reserved for the guests. The bamboo shoots in the bamboo forest behind the house have not yet sprouted, usually do not want to eat, but this day carried a hoe to plow a few trees, used to fry bacon, the flavor is very beautiful. On the table, the old man will hold out the new open altar of medicinal wine, tell the guests what good herbs used to make wine. The afternoon tea is usually glutinous rice sweet wine with eggs. The guest's bowl must also have red dates, cinnamon and dried lychees. It is only at dusk or even after dinner that the drunken and talkative brother-in-law is helped home together by his brother-in-law.

"On the first day of the month, the son is called a cub, on the second day of the month, the son is called a son, on the third day of the month, on the fourth day of the month, the son is called a place. Here, the son is called "pup" and the son-in-law is called "Lang". After the second son-in-law door, it is the local neighbors congratulate each other on the new year, but also to play dragon lanterns and lion dance time. Are you a cub or half a cub...?

The Lantern Festival

Presumably because of the phonetic sound, the villagers will "wake up the garden" on the day of the Lantern Festival.

The gardens are mostly in front of and behind the houses, near the ponds. The garden is surrounded by purple jasmine and dense tea trees. On the water's side, there is a reed grass or willow. At this time of the year, it is still a bit cold, and there are still a few nests of snow in the shade of the garden. But the cabbages and radishes in the garden are in their prime, and the coriander and chrysanthemums are at their freshest.

The procedure for "waking up the garden" is simple. With a few grass handle a few money paper two firecrackers to the garden, in the open space to light the grass handle, burn a few money paper, and then cracking firecrackers to wake up the winter sleep of the vegetable garden God. People are next to the silent prayers, nothing more than "bless this year's vegetable growth, no bugs and ants," and other simple and practical small wish. Then light a dry cigarette, in between swallowing, began to calculate this piece of planting what vegetables, that line of planting what melons. By the time the cigarette burns out, you can pull a cabbage or a couple of carrots, and get ready to make lunch.

Naturally, the staple food for both lunch and dinner is dumplings.

The housewife washes and scrubs the stone mill a day or two before and sets it up under the eaves of the house. The rice is also soaked and softened in advance. With a wooden rice ladle, she scooped up the glutinous rice and a little bit of water, and rushed it down through the eye of the mill. With the even rotation of the mill, the milky white and delicate rice paste slowly flowed out from between the cracks of the mill, emitting the fragrance of glutinous rice, and dripped down into the big wooden basin under the mill stand. The rice paste in the basin is too thin, so it is necessary to use a white cotton cloth to drain off the excess water, and then use dry coal ash to absorb the water through the cloth. At this point, the rice paste is half-dry, half-wet, and as soft as rubber clay, so it can be rubbed and molded as you like. We call this "tugging". When the rice paste is wrapped with fillings, it is called "Yuanxiao Duantuan". The varieties of fillings were far less varied than today's, with sugar and sesame seeds being the only two. But the manual labor process of soaking the rice, pushing the mill to drain the water, pulling the pulp, wrapping the filling and rubbing the dough, adds a lot to the atmosphere of the New Year's festivals.

"The fire on New Year's Eve and the lanterns on the night of the Lantern Festival.

Almost every family makes lanterns for their children. The lanterns made by the villagers are simple in shape and colorful and festive. Most of them are round "drum lanterns", long "carp lanterns", or slightly more complicated "rabbit lanterns". But this is enough to keep the children excited all night long. Under the moonlight, the red lanterns stand out. The children carry the lanterns with joy and care, their eyes glowing red. They wander along the village embankment or are invited to the ancestral hall to watch the "Dihua Drums".

The ancestral halls of the big clans are bustling with drums and gongs on this night. There were people on stilts with red faces, and there were people dressed as boatmen rowing a dry boat. There was the "Laughing Lohan" who wore a big fat mask and shook a fan, and there was the "Mussel Shell Spirit" who opened and closed a bead and glittered. The most attractive part of the festival is the singing of "Jihua Drums". The so-called "Dihua Drum" is a flower-drum opera performance organized by the local villagers themselves, as opposed to the regular flower-drum opera troupes in Changsha. While the regular troupes perform on a stage, the "Dihua Drums" perform on the ground without a stage. This is probably where the name "Dihua Drums" comes from!

"Ground Flower Drum" is also inevitable to perform "Liu Hai Chopping Piao", "playing gong", "mending pot" and other classic flower-drum opera. But the props and costumes are not as professional and elaborate as those of the troupe. However, these repertoires are all about chopping wood and planting fields and other side stories, and the villagers are all familiar with them, so they perform them without any trace of artifice. And it is also sung in dialect, which adds a lot of natural humor. Because there is no stage, the script is not very strict, the actors will often come to a little "improvisation", looking for the audience to play a joke, to provoke everyone to laugh happily. The audience was poked fun of the audience also has a quick response to the spicy bold, pick up on the words of the play, ridicule, but also won the crowd a holler!

Really look back on those good times ....

There are still... But much more pared down

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