This is the last year: chancre, the twenty-third day of the first lunar month.
After breakfast, the village's friends took sickles and baskets to the hillside to cut wild artemisia, the mountains at the end of the first month are often bare, those wild artemisias are also hiding in Tibet under the obscene threat of winter, simply the children are fun by nature, full of madness, looking, cutting, almost in the afternoon, the back basket is finally cut, so everyone will be satisfied to rush back, ready for dark: chancre.
Burning chancre, a folk custom in the countryside of Longdong, on the twenty-third night of the first month, the paper-cutter pierced holes all over the body, when the door burned grass, the children jumped around people, and the paper people were burned, and the disease was eliminated.
Before dark, each family took down the New Year's couplet, door god, paper lantern early, prepared the green beard garlic skin, salt, fireworks, etc., just after dark, they lit up the firewood that had been prepared in their yard, put in the onion beard garlic skin, salt, fireworks, etc., suddenly crackled, the fire soared, the sparks splashed, the scene was very spectacular, the children were even happier, cheered loudly, at first the flames were relatively high, people still did not dare to cross on it, and when the fire was smaller, The adults urged the children to jump back and forth on the fire, and the adults said that this would ward off evil spirits and dispel diseases and disasters. Some people who are not agile will sometimes jump into the fire, sometimes they will bring up all the way to Mars, burn their pants and burn their shoes, at that time, the mother is not strange, they will say, this doll will be safe in the future, in peacetime, the doll will burn a hole in the pants, and it is indispensable to go back to a beating.
When the flames were gone, the grandmother would instruct her father to take out the broom early, press the embers with a wooden shovel, beat it with a broom, and read while beating: "One dozen wheat flowers, two dozen buckwheat flowers, three dozen corn flowers, four dozen millet millet flowers, and good crops every year", predicting the harvest of which grain that year according to the shape of the sparks.
Children are often greedy when they play, they will burn their own chancres throughout the village and burn other people's homes, then parents are not strange, they will say happily, go, burn more and less diseases.
At this point, the whole year is over, in the countryside, this is the end of the whole big year on this day, from tomorrow, busy farming work began to pack up farm tools, people who went out are also ready to leave, children should also go to school, unconsciously, the stream in the ditch has also quietly melted, the old people will say happily, look, spring is coming.
On the twenty-third day of the first month of the year, every household burns chancre; exorcism of diseases and ghosts, health and peace of the years, the twenty-third day of the first month, this ancient folk custom of praying for health and happiness and the meaning of abundant grain in the year is still continuing to this day, for the people in the city, they do not seem to have heard of it, and every loess child in our Longdong side is known to everyone, burning, it is not only a folk activity, but also a prayer for happiness, peace and health in the underworld.