Four hundred words of custom composition for Spring Festival in Baoding, Hebei Province

The old custom of Spring Festival in Baoding, Hebei;

Going to the market is a prelude to the Chinese New Year. At that time, as the Spring Festival approached, parents always talked about going to the market to buy old things such as brooms and curtains for their homes, but mainly to buy delicious food such as melon seeds, peanuts, sugar, meat and vegetables. At this time, most mothers are most entangled in adding new clothes to their children. Especially for families with financial difficulties, most of them will choose to pull back a few feet of cloth and entrust relatives and friends with tailoring skills to help sew it, which will bring some surprises to children who have been looking forward to it for a year. In an era of insufficient food and clothing, it is a very shameful thing for adults and children to have no new clothes for the New Year.

After the New Year, the food preparation for the New Year officially began. Many staple foods such as steamed rice cakes and steamed bread were prepared in advance. At that time, the refrigerator was still a myth, and the cold weather in the north could play a very good role in keeping fresh. Make a good staple food-adults don't have to work too hard for the New Year.

Thirty or forty years ago, there were no cooking tools such as pressure cookers and rice cookers. Stewed meat and boiled fish are also carried out in advance, and the specific time for each arrangement is different. There is often a fragrance under the eaves of others, and neighbors pass by and ask loudly: Have you started stewing meat? The housewife answered loudly with a smile. Naughty children at home run around the pot like kittens. Mothers infected by the atmosphere of Chinese New Year are in a better mood. They often yell at each other, but they open the lid of the pot and first take out two pieces with chopsticks to satisfy their hunger.

Speaking of eating, like most northern urban and rural areas, the food festival in the eyes of Baoding children decades ago was a prelude to childhood. Most people know the tradition of "offering honeydew melons to the stove on the 23rd of the twelfth lunar month". Although many families can't feel the ceremony of sending "Kitchen God", most housewives will buy snacks such as honeydew melons from this day to attract children to see those honeydew melons that should be enjoyed by Kitchen God, which is a bit drooling and funny.

Northern China always pays attention to "going home to catch jiaozi for 30 nights", even after the New Year. Therefore, the old Baoding people attach great importance to the two meals on the eve of the New Year's Eve and the morning of the first day, and in the past, most families ate jiaozi at home for these two meals. The family sat around the table, young and old laid hands on him with jiaozi, and then waited for the steaming jiaozi to serve. Male elders sometimes drink a little wine and happily exchange their experiences and feelings over the past year. Compared with today's Spring Festival, that kind of scene and atmosphere has a different taste. Now the Spring Festival is often eaten in hotels and even sung and reveled by young people.

According to the old rules, this meal in jiaozi on New Year's Day is the first meal for the whole family, with special emphasis on the meaning of "reunion". Because of the special meaning of "making money into treasure and not letting the blessings flow out", this meal in Jiaozi not only excludes outsiders, but even the married daughter can't come back to eat. It seems that this is a bad habit today.

After the 30 th and the first day, firecrackers are still popping up one after another, and the theme of eating in the Spring Festival is far from over. Throughout the first month, when relatives and family members walk around each other, when lions and stilts are held in the village, children's eyes will always find those interesting and delicious targets. Although the food in the north of China is similar to a great extent, people in other places can't enjoy Baoding candied haws, candied noodles and roasted sweet potatoes. As for Dingxing's cornmeal pancakes, Anxin's mangzi, chicken head, old water chestnut and other county food features are beyond the length of this article.