Written by Mu Ran
Once upon a time, the New Year was simple and satisfying.
When I was in Mongolia, China was still in the stage of supply control, and the annual cloth ticket rationed by the government to each person was one foot and six feet, which is a bit strange to say now, but at that time, everyone seemed to understand the government very well, no one protested, and no one petitioned. I remember that a month before the Spring Festival every year, my mother hurriedly finished the housework after returning home from work, and buried her head in front of the sewing machine day and night, cutting out several sets of new clothes of a family size from the limited cloth, and now I think of it and think that my mother is really great, even if "it is difficult for a smart woman to cut without cloth", but there seems to be nothing difficult for her in our family. Before going to bed at the end of the thirty-year period, my brother and I must have put a set of ironed new clothes on the bedside, and the dense and exquisite handwork was as thin as the square of homework in my memory, neat and tidy.
New Year's Greetings
Our family has a lot of attention to the festival. Year 23, 4 is Xie Zaojun, the father set up the statue of the god of the stove, wrote on the stove, and then put on the fasting, roast meat, chicken, citrus, candy, tea, wine, gold and silver clothing paper, incense candles and other items, our family under the leadership of the father, light red candles to worship three times, toast tea, follow the father to say some auspicious words, the so-called father cloud, I also cloud, as for what the words mean, never thought about it; the twenty-eighth year is to wash sloppy days, in addition to the fact that we have to bathe with grapefruit leaf water, every year at this time, The mother would make a long broom out of freshly cut sunflower leaves, sweep every green tile on the roof of the house, and then place large and small candy boxes on the coffee table, and the ancestral shrine was also arranged according to the family rules, and everything was done in an orderly manner.
Happy Spring
Cantonese people will wrap oil horns, fried eggs scattered, steamed rice cakes during the Spring Festival, these work is generally done in the year of twenty-nine, thirty, because of the superstitious relationship, every time at this time, the mother will thousands of instructions, children should be afraid of speaking, what should not be said can not be said, such as "dead", "oil horn exploded", "finished" and other words must not be said. It's just a pity that the fairy tale is unscrupulous, who cares so much? Every year, our brothers and sons would say something "new" and unlucky, and our mother would simply kick our brothers out of the house and let us play outside for a day, which was a matter of great hope for us.
In the past, the New Year was basically a children's world, when there was no MP3, no XBox 360 and no iPad, and the biggest fun was lighting firecrackers and burning fireworks. A "drip of gold", from burning to extinguishing is not more than a minute of time, we are happy to draw many different curves in the night sky, very happy. Writing this, I especially miss my deceased father, an intellectual from old China, who was tolerant and laissez-faire in his discipline of us, and never told us that we could not do this, that we could not do that. Lighting firecrackers is dangerous, I remember one year I accidentally blew my fingers black, and my father not only did not blame me, but also laughed and bent down.
Now the deepest impression is that the Spring Festival is coming, the father bought a lot of fireworks and firecrackers, and then divided into two, he let me pick first, and then it was the turn of the brother, the brother felt unfair, he complained that his father was a Tang monk, always spoiled the eight precepts of the pig, did not appreciate the hardships of Sun Wukong as an older brother, the father heard the words very frankly said to him: You are the brother, you do not let the younger brother, do you want the younger brother to let you? Hearing my father say this, I was embarrassed to pick first, and the two brothers began to push each other, while my father showed a proud smile on his face.
Ancestor worship and opening pen
My family is very serious about the New Year, I think this is related to the father is three generations of single deposit, young lost father. In his concept, the Spring Festival every year is the most important time to worship ancestors and mourn relatives, and he does not dare to slack off at all.
Our family engaged in the tea business in Fuzhou in the early years, and my grandfather was already a tea house opened by the British in Fuzhou at a young age, and the main business was to sell tea to the United Kingdom. When my father was seven years old, my grandfather died of tuberculosis, and before he died, he passed all the family property to another uncle and brother, on the condition that the clan relative had to help his father grow up. Because of this change, the grandmother and father became nothing, and their lives were all taken care of by their clan relatives, and they suffered a lot. When I was in elementary school, I remember my mother telling me that every spring festival, my father would always wake up in the morning and be silent in front of my grandfather's statue for a long time, and once she heard my father say: Why did you leave me so early? I can't honor you.
When I was two years old, my grandmother died without a problem. It was the first day of the New Year, and after the relatives and friends had finished their visits, my grandmother said that she was a little tired, so she went into the bedroom to take a nap. Since that year, my family has been fasting with my father every New Year's Day, and my father said that this is a gratitude to my grandmother for raising her throughout her life.
My father was a good man who did what he said. Every year on the first morning of the first year, after paying homage to his ancestors, he would unfold the red paper, personally study the ink, first write "The new year begins, all things are good", followed by some auspicious words, written down one by one, on the annual orange pot, or pasted under the daffodil plate.
Speaking of daffodils, my father not only knew flowers and flowers, but also loved and cherished flowers. Two months before the Spring Festival every year, he would take me to pick up daffodils, and I remember that he taught me to identify a good daffodil head, which must be in positive color, full in form, full in feel, heavy enough, the bottom is deeply concave into the sphere, and the foot buds should be evenly symmetrical. Narcissus head to buy home, to carefully carve, different knife techniques, out of the flower language is also different. The carved daffodil ball can bloom at a normal temperature (15-20 degrees Celsius), and it will bloom in about 45 days.
The best thing about soaking narcissus is to control the flowering until the first day of the New Year, which requires that all links be accurate. In the south, early spring cultivation of daffodils, if encountered rainy, cold weather, the flowering period will be particularly long, you need to adjust the indoor temperature, to urge the flowers to bloom. At that time, there was no heating in our home, and to promote the flowering period, we usually used a plastic bag as a warm film, and then put the flowers next to the coal stove to accelerate the flowering. I remember that one year my father went to a foreign country on business, and before leaving, he asked me to place the water puppet next to the honeycomb coal stove for 20 minutes every day to control the flowering period, and I didn't know that I was lazy and let go for two days and two nights, and the flower grew wildly like bamboo, shaped like Yao Ming. Father came back from the field, saw the flower branches of the tall buildings, helpless, he laughed and said "rising higher and higher", did not expect that in the late 30th of the year, "rising and rising" not only bloomed brilliantly, but also because of the weight of the flowers bent down, which is naturally not a good thing for superstitious people, the first flower of the new year has withered, and the flowers are bent, this is a bad omen, in order to reverse the disadvantage, he found several bamboo branches, with a red rope in a circle to fix the flower branches, claiming that this is "a high rise and a backer". In order to prolong the flowering period, he put half an aspirin in the water and moved the pot to a cold corner, and it was a miracle that the daffodils of that year, under the care of their father, actually blossomed from the thirty-year to the new fifteenth without dropping the buds.
There are many good memories of the New Year. The living conditions were not as good as they are now, and the way of playing was very monotonous, but we were all happy and very affectionate, and I think this is because we didn't have too many temptations and dreams in our hearts. At that time, the family was reunited, which was the greatest happiness, so the old days were always so warm and transparent, and such memories were far better than wealth for my life.
Read this article, taste the past of Guangzhou:
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Two thousand years ago, how wide was the Pearl River in Guangzhou?
In those years, I saw cars on the road in Guangzhou
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