Mount of the King of the Stove: Stove Horse | Small Year Sacrifice Stove

The mount of the Stove King, the Stove Horse

In the early years, the twenty-third day of the Waxing Moon, the small Year, the sacrifice stove.

Sugar melon is naturally indispensable, and use sugar melon to stick to the mouth of the stove king, so that he can say more beautiful words for the family in front of the Jade Emperor after he goes to heaven. It seems that the heart of the stove king is not spacious, or how to leave a sentence after the break called "the stove king reached out - take the sugar".

Taking sugar, the Beijing dialect means that things that were otherwise easy to do were deliberately dragged on, in order to get benefits. When I was young, I didn't have a sacrificial stove, and the scene of the sacrificial stove was to listen to the stories told by my hometown. The stove king is a smoked paper statue pasted in the kitchen shrine, and when the sacrifice is offered to the table, sugar melons are placed on the table, incense candles are lit, thousands of yellow watches are shaken open, and a plate of black beans and a bowl of water are specially matched, which is the feed for the horses fed to the king of the stove.

The old and young masters of the family prostrated their heads against the offering table, glued a piece of sugar melon to the mouth of the king of the stove, and together with the pair of "heaven says good things, returns to the palace to descend auspiciously" and the horizontal batch of "the head of the family" and burned it in the brazier.

Chinese New Year's Eve when the sky was dark that day, please come back to Zhang Xin. I have not seen the sacrificial stove in person, but when I was a child, I did sell it, but it was purely seasonal sweets. When I bought it, it was frozen and crunchy, and the more I put it in my mouth, the more I bit it, the sticky teeth became.

At that time, the image of the stove king could not be seen in the kitchen, but the mount of his old man's home, the stove horse.

The stove horse grew about the size of a cockroach, larger than a cockroach, with six legs, brownish yellow, wings in sight, hunched over, towering with two slender rammed legs, and a pair of curved whiskers on its head.

The old people said that they thought that the stove king was riding it to the heavens, and the size of the stove king was not big. Don't look at the stove horse can not fly, nor is it good at fighting, it is natural to be qualified to be a horse to ride the stove king.

Stove horses are good at jumping, and a jump can be more than half a person tall.

Sometimes I saw the small thing two thin and long rammers leaping backwards, stretching their feet, light in stature, like the dance steps of a ballet dancer in the air, and then floating steadily two feet away, leaving almost no mark on the ash.

The idiom "traces" in the idiom "traces of horses" refers to the traces of the weakness of the horse on the stove, not the hoof marks of the tall horse.

If this little thing is really as big as a tall horse, according to this jumping ratio, it may really jump up to the sky. Stove horses love to find warm places to stay, love to eat leftovers from the kitchen, and especially like to jump around in the evening where there is light near the stove.

Don't look at it as a bug in the kitchen, it is not annoying, if anyone can often see the stove horse, it can symbolize wealth.

The friction of the hind legs of the stove horse will also make a delicate sound, although the sound is not as loud as the cockroach, but in the autumn night, it sounds like "chirping and chirping" has a delicate charm. Although some people call it stove crickets or stove crickets, stove horses are far less fun than crickets, and generally no one catches them. Some people also think that this sound is like a chicken, so they call it "stove chicken".

Occasionally, a child wants to catch it, so he deliberately gets some rice particles to scatter on the kitchen floor when it is dark, and shines it with a flashlight not far away. The stove horse saw the light and did not know which one to hit and jumped over, and when it was addicted to eating, it covered it with a net, and the little thing jumped in on its own. Don't look at it jumping high, but it will only jump in one direction above, and it will not use its brain to slip away from the bottom. In the past, suburban kitchens used brick earthen stoves, and stove horses could be seen everywhere.

Every household in the city uses a briquette stove, and although it is not an earth stove, the stove horse is also frequented. Later, every household used a gas canister, and there were fewer and fewer stove horses.

Now living in the building, the stove horse has become a rarity.

Over the years, the Stove King has appeared again.

On the twenty-third day of the Waxing Moon, many people buy a statue of Zhang Zaowang and paste it on the range hood, stick a piece of sugar melon on their mouths, and make a scene and a happy picture. But many young people have never seen what a stove is, let alone the stove horse, the mount of the stove king.

——Excerpt from "The Living Creatures of the Courtyard"