My hometown is in a small mountain village in Shonan, and the festival of ancestor worship in the year, except for the Qingming Festival, is the Zhongyuan Festival.
Zhongyuan Festival, also known as "Ghost Festival", or "July and a Half", but in our hometown, it is generally July 14th to celebrate Zhongyuan Festival.
Compared with the Qingming Festival, it is also an ancestor worship, but the Zhongyuan Festival is more lively and lasting than the Qingming Festival. During the Qingming Festival, everything is renewed, families are invited, front and back hugs, a string of firecrackers and a few piles of paper money, after the firecrackers are fired, the smoke dissipates, and they embark on the return journey, the time is only one day.
However, the Zhongyuan Festival is very different, as early as the eleventh day of the seventh month of the lunar calendar, families began to prepare to welcome the "old guest" (dialect), that is, the deceased ancestors. For three meals a day, we must first prepare meals for the ancestors, and we must also pour some wine. The food offered is actually exquisite. When I was young, my grandmother told me that I couldn't serve loofah because the first people thought that the shape of loofah looked like a snake, which would scare them into going near the dinner table, usually based on meat. In the years of poverty, it is impossible to provide meat for every meal, and eggs can also be provided. But you can't serve leftovers, otherwise it is disrespectful to your ancestors. After the meal is prepared, the family will beckon the ancestors to enjoy it, and there are words in their mouths, mostly to bless the safety and health of the future generations. Three meals a day, this is the case, until the fourteenth day of the lunar calendar.
The fourteenth day is the official Zhongyuan Festival, and it is necessary to send "old guests". There are many traditional customs in the Zhongyuan Festival in my hometown, and burning paper money is one of them. Although it is related to superstition, it also deduces the eternal nostalgia of future generations for their ancestors and their deceased relatives.
I remember when I was a child, whenever the Mid-Yuan Festival approached, adults would make coins. Father laid the paper money flat on a long stool and carefully beat it with an iron mold that was used only once a year to make the coin. The iron mold is round, much like the appearance of an ancient copper coin, with a square opening in the middle, and the size is similar to that of a bronze coin. I always asked my father curiously: Why does this paper money look like an ancient copper coin? My father told me that this was handed down from generation to generation, it should be in Hades, and only this kind of coin was circulated. I seem to understand.
The times are developing, now it is difficult to find a mold to make the coin, as long as it costs more than ten dollars, outside the commissary or stall, more is the well-made coin, but also relatively neat and smooth, not so much raw edge.
Preparing the coins is just preparation, and you need to write a good envelope. Use a blank piece of paper to indicate who gave this money to which ancestor, such as "filial piety so-and-so to strict father or loving mother so-and-so a handful of money" and so on. Father's writing is very beautiful, every year on the day of the Middle Day, the surrounding neighbors come to ask my father to help write, and there are dozens of pieces of writing. Now there is such a paper on the market, just fill in the names of the juniors and ancestors, and finally write the date.
After all, my father is almost seventy years old, the eyes are not very good, every time I go home, my father has given me this task, through his teaching, I also know that men and women are exquisite, if it is paper money burned to the grandfather, then write "grandfather Tang Men so-and-so old man", if it is burned to the grandmother, then you have to write "Grandmother Tang Men Yi clan so-and-so old and children". Write a lot, naturally light car familiar road. In my hometown, if a family of five people is a family, then you have to write five sheets. But in my husband's hometown, which is only ten kilometers away from my home, they only need to write that the head of the household leads the whole family to offer it, which is more convenient. Each packet is placed on the top layer of a pile of coins, and a rope is slightly tied to avoid scattering.
Burning paper money is a custom in many places. In fact, what I am most looking forward to is the Kirito leaf rice dumplings that I will eat on this day, which is the highlight of the Zhongyuan Festival. I have asked many friends, only to learn that the custom of eating tong ye cane on the Middle Yuan Festival is not in every township, and there are sixteen townships in the county, and only the two northernmost townships have this custom, which is passed down from generation to generation.
I remember when I was young, near the Middle Yuan Festival, the daughter who married out of the country had to go back to her mother's house to send paper money. Every year my mother came back to her mother's house, she took me with her. To go to my grandmother's house to walk twenty miles of mountain road, the road side occasionally met with one or two oil tung trees, the mother said that when she came back, she would pick some tung leaves, and on the day of the Zhongyuan Festival, she would do tung leaves.
The production of tung leaf rice dumplings is actually very simple, kneading glutinous rice flour into a ball, adding sugar, wrapping the tung leaves, steaming can be. For me, this is the best memory of childhood, because there is a taste of maternal love. Five years ago, after my mother died, every year when I returned to my hometown on the Middle Day, I made my own tongye dumplings, which for me was not only a delicacy, but also a feeling.
Today back to my hometown, in order to make tung leaf rice dumplings, I made preparations in advance. First instructed my father to pick some tung leaves, I kneaded the dough at home, and when I returned home, I directly wrapped the tung leaves and steamed them in a pot.
In the morning, I helped my father write the envelopes, and after lunch, I joined the cubs in the production of tung leaf dumplings. I took a small piece of the large dough, kneaded it into an oval shape, wrapped it in tung leaves, and the cubs were ingenious, pressing the small dough into a cake shape and sprinkling it with a little sesame seeds.
At night, after the meal is ready, we begin to "send off". On a bench in front of the house, meals and wine were placed. The father sprinkled a circle on the ground with lime, stacked the pierced coins in it, the middle should not be too solid, there should be room for easy burning, and then put some scattered coins at the bottom to ignite. Sometimes, clothes and banknotes made of paper are bought and put into the fire. Fire, firecrackers. My family of four, as well as my father, all bowed and murmured words, letting the departed ancestors bless us with smooth work at work, all those who went to school to learn and progress, and all our relatives and friends to be safe and healthy.
In the smoke, I saw those coins slowly turn into ashes, flying in the sky, as if they were reluctant to leave, like our long thoughts about our ancestors, and at the end, they were finally blown by the wind to the far side that could not be seen.