Small years
In my hometown of the mountains, there was no Lantern Festival before, and I always called the fifteenth day of the first month a small year (and now it is also).
I have learned in recent years that most other places call the twenty-third or twenty-fourth lunar month a small year. My mother and sister said that the twenty-fourth day of the Waxing Moon was also important to us, saying that this day was the day of the rat marrying the girl, and that we should hide the scissors, send the stove to the king, clean up the dust, and officially start the busy year.
But we have never called this important waxing moon twenty-four small year, but only used it as a new node of the New Year after "Waxing Moon Eight Does Not Say Nonsense", sweeping away the fried brine, which means that the pace of the year is getting closer and closer.
We also eat the Lantern on the fifteenth day of the first month, but it is not called the Lantern, it is called Tangyuan. Our family's tangyuan is not only cooked and eaten, but also more when fried and fried with sugar to make a bowl of dishes. This dish must have a bowl on the table every year; the first month of hospitality is also indispensable, I don't know if it is because of the meaning or for the number of bowls.
Many things are rare in the hour, and so is glutinous rice. Our brigade mainly grows rice, but it is not allowed to multiply glutinous rice, because it is not a staple food after all. Each team will try or secretly plant some sticky rice for the New Year. In high school, I made two good friends when relatives walked around; they were from the river area, and they mainly planted wheat and cotton, and also planted some peanuts. Before the New Year, we came to the door to bring gifts, I sent glutinous rice, yin rice, they returned peanuts, cotton.
The little glutinous rice that the family got was very expensive, almost only enough for a year. Generally half of the foam hair steamed and dried to make yin rice, after the twenty-fourth day of the Waxing Moon, fried into rice flowers to seal the altar, the first month guests come to visit the New Year, when we get home, we will first boil water to brew a bowl of sugar water rice flowers to cushion their stomachs, and then wait for the meal. After I got married, I brought rice flowers to my in-laws in the city, and my father-in-law liked it, but he asked many times why he didn't make it into rice candy, which I had never heard of, and it was difficult to buy sugar in the mountains at that time. I remember that my mother once invited someone to come home to make maltose, and I forgot how to make it, but I remember that it was delicious.
The other half of the glutinous rice is left to be made into rice balls after the 24th of the Waxing Moon. Rice soaked for more than a day with a small stone grinding into a pulp, my mother turned the mill when I played hands to help feed the grinding, but also occasionally changed hands to grind; the polished rice milk with grass and wood ash gauze absorbed water to precipitate dry, is glutinous rice flour. The pulp powder is stored in large wet pieces, and it is broken into pieces until the fifteenth day of the first month. Although the temperature in winter is low, but after a long time, it is inevitable to deteriorate, the white will become dull, and the cooking will glow with slices of orange, and the taste is no longer fresh and pure, mixed with acid. Even so, I am reluctant to discard it, crush it and dry it for storage, and eat it slowly at home.
Our rice balls and rice flowers are not made into rice candy, there is no filling, are made into raw solid, to eat the taste, is cooked in the soup with sugar or honey, cooking is simple, fried after sugar frying, this dish is generally placed at the end, fried well that is on the table, otherwise the hard bite can not move after cold. We never make it salty. Wrapped core tangyuan, the father has not tasted in his life, the mother has spent a lot of Lantern Festival in the city, sandwich tangyuan must have eaten a lot. I followed my mother-in-law to buy glutinous rice flour and sesame bean paste to wrap together after marriage, and I learned that tangyuan still has this kind of food.
The old family still retains the habit of eating new year meals on the fifteenth day of the first month and eating new year meals. Tuan Nian in our dialect to make a stall year, fifteen this New Year's dinner stall, the year is really over, it is time to prepare for agricultural affairs, smash things and say the wrong thing will not be scolded. It is also after this day that labor production is officially started, and children's schooling is often only after this day.
On the fifteenth day, she called her sister, and she was preparing steamed lattice with her daughter-in-law to make a small New Year meal, saying that at noon their family would eat, and the son's family would rush to the daughter-in-law's house to eat the evening's small New Year's dinner, and then the grandson would start school tomorrow, and the son would be ready to leave for Guangdong to work.