What are the customs of Chaoshan Mid-Autumn Festival?

As an ancient traditional folk culture, when the silver moon (commonly known as "Moon Mother") rises to the sky, boys and girls dressed in festive costumes gather in front of the swing. According to the custom here, women can't swing, but watch. It is boys who can show their talents. They competed on the swing to see who could swing high and turn fast.

In the laughter of onlookers, the single-seat and two-seat swings threw rainbows at Moon Mother, and the "cross" swings flew around with garlands. It is a hero in the eyes of girls, who swings the highest and turns the fastest, thus gaining their love.

2. Mother roaming the moon

Innocent boys and girls have been pestering their grandmothers to tell the story of Moon Mother since they were knocked unconscious to learn English. The moon has become the golden dream of children. So in the Mid-Autumn Festival, adults split bamboo into wood, tied it into a skeleton the size of a footbath, and pasted it into a full moon with wool paper.

On the night of Mid-Autumn Festival, children light candles in their mother's belly, carry them on their shoulders, and dance and swim in the hazy deep alley. Seen from a distance, the moon seems to have fallen to the earth. The golden dream has become a reality that both boys and girls can grasp and touch. This is an interesting trip to "Mother Moon".

3. Yue Bai's mother

After dinner that day, the women bathed and changed clothes, and were busy setting tables in the patio, gatehouse and hall where the Moon Mother could be seen, putting on bed skirts embroidered with auspicious birds and animals and rich flowers, and putting on washed fruits, cloud cakes and moon cakes. People cut out various mascots from red paper and put them on cakes and fruits. After everything was settled, we lit red candles and burned high incense, and began to wait for the moon to ascend to heaven.

After autumn, ripe pomelo, green pear, red pear, pineapple, banana, Lin Ling, longan, carambola, red persimmon and ox-heart persimmon are on the market one after another, and the dazzling array of fruits naturally become the best products in Yue Bai during the Mid-Autumn Festival. Therefore, Mid-Autumn Festival is also called "Fruit Festival" and "Lent Festival".

In the past, poor people had to buy some moon cakes to save food and money. Those who really can't afford to support them will feel ashamed and burst into tears when they worship Yueniang, and repeatedly ask Yueniang for forgiveness. Besides fruits and cakes, the offerings must also be steamed taro.

Step 4 give each other moon cakes

The Mid-Autumn Festival in Chaoshan area not only has the custom of eating moon cakes, but also gives them to each other, which promotes the development of the production technology of Chaoshan moon cakes, from the initial family production to the specialized workshop production, and Chaoshan moon cakes are also called Chaozhou moon cakes.

Yixi moon cakes, Sunan moon cakes and Guiyu moon cakes have long been well-known, and they are listed as one of the five famous moon cakes in China, along with Beijing-style moon cakes, Cantonese-style moon cakes, Soviet-style moon cakes and Tianjin-style moon cakes.

5. Tile burning tower

In some rural areas, besides Yue Bai, tile towers and smoke piles are also burned. After the children get up in the morning, they pick up tiles and bricks everywhere, then carry them and carry them to the threshing floor designated by their elders. Experienced adults build these tiles and bricks into a hollow tower. The tower is more than ten feet high, and no one around it can hug each other. There is also a tower gate below, but there is no tower gate above.

Then fill the tower with straw, firewood and green gold leaves sent by families. In mid-June, when the women in the village prayed for the moon and cremated the gold ingot before filing the case, an elder lit a fire at the entrance of the tower, and slowly, a string of flames shot out from the top of the tower.

In order to help fuel burn and add color, people throw salt into the tower one after another from time to time, and there is a crackling sound. Soon, the flame became a dragon, soaring into the sky, reflecting half the sky. Children sang and danced around the fire tower, while adults drank tea and ate cakes and talked about the past and the present until Watta burned into a transparent and glittering golden tower.

6, burning smoke pile

Every household piled straw and firewood into hill-like firewood piles in several places in the village. At the end of Yue Bai, they also lit that pile of firewood like Watta.