The meaning of northerners eating dumplings during the Winter Solstice:

Meaning 1: If you don’t carry the dumpling bowl during the Winter Solstice, your ears will freeze off and no one will care.

As the proverb goes: On October 1, the winter solstice arrives, every household eats dumplings. This custom is said to have been left behind in memory of the medical sage Zhang Zhongjing who gave up medicine during the winter solstice. Therefore, in northern China, on the winter solstice of the lunar calendar, dumplings become an indispensable holiday meal for everyone, rich or poor.

Meaning 2: When the winter solstice arrives, eat dumplings and be reunited.

In some places, as soon as the Winter Solstice arrives, families will be busy preparing various dumpling wrappers and dumpling fillings, and then the family will sit around making dumplings and eating dumplings, reunited Celebrate the winter solstice. In addition to eating dumplings in the north, there is also the custom of eating glutinous rice balls in the south, which means fullness and reunion.

The historical origin of eating dumplings during the winter solstice

Zhang Zhongjing was a famous medical scientist in the late Eastern Han Dynasty. He had excellent medical skills, collected medical prescriptions extensively, and wrote the masterpiece "Treatise on Febrile and Miscellaneous Diseases" handed down from generation to generation. .

Zhang Zhongjing once worked as an official in Changsha. When he was about to return to his hometown to retire, there happened to be a particularly cold winter with flying snowflakes and biting wind. Zhang Zhongjing felt very uncomfortable when he saw that many homeless people had their ears rotten due to the cold. After returning home, he devoted himself to developing a therapeutic formula called "Quhan Jiao Er Decoction" that could keep out the cold.

Quhan Jiao Er Soup was actually boiling mutton and some anti-cold medicine in a pot. After the mutton is cooked, take it out and chop it into pieces, wrap it in dough to look like ears, and then cook it in a pot. Put it in the pot and use the original soup to cook the dough wrapped with fillings.

Zhang Zhongjing distributed cold-repelling jiaoer soup to every poor person. After eating, people felt warm all over and their ears were warm, and their ears would never be frostbitten again. Since Zhang Zhongjing passed away on the Winter Solstice, he also made "Quhan Jiao Er Soup" for everyone on the Winter Solstice. In order to commemorate him, everyone will eat dumplings on the Winter Solstice from then on, and they all say that eating dumplings on the Winter Solstice If you eat dumplings, your ears will not freeze in winter.