The Flower Dynasty Festival is popular in North China, East China, Central and Southern China, also known as the "Picking Vegetable Festival", referred to as "Flower Dynasty". The time of the solar calendar is March, roughly before the spring equinox after the sting, and the lunar festival varies from place to place. Beijing and Kaifeng in Henan are on the 12th day of the 2nd lunar month; in Zhejiang and Northeast China, on the 15th day of the 2nd lunar month; and in Luoyang, Henan, on the second day of the first month of February. According to legend, this day is the "Hundred Peanuts Day", and during the Flower Festival, the people hold entertainment activities such as flower viewing, flower planting, green walking and red viewing.
1. Flower Dynasty Festival: A festival to commemorate the Hundred Flowers Fairy
The Flower Dynasty Festival (the second day of the second month of the lunar calendar), also known as the Flower King Festival, the Hundred Flowers Fairy Festival or the Flower Po Festival, is a traditional festival of the Zhuang people in Ningming and Longzhou, Guangxi. The Flower Dynasty Festival is a festival commemorating the Hundred Flowers Fairy, which is said to have descended on the second day of the second month of the lunar calendar. The Hundred Flowers Fairy, also known as the Flower King and the Flower Woman, is a goddess revered by the Zhuang people. Legend has it that the god Hua Po is in charge of human beings to have children and is also the protector of children, so after the birth of the baby, most people set up a goddess of the Flower King at the head of the bed in the bedroom, placed a bouquet of flowers plucked from the outdoors or flowers cut from red paper, and every first or fifteenth day of the first or fifteenth day, incense must be burned to worship; the child is uncomfortable, worship it. On the 29th day of the second month of the lunar calendar, a great sacrifice is made to pray for the health of the children.
The Flower Festival is generally spent in a place with tall kapok trees. Young men and women dressed in national costumes gathered from all directions, carrying food such as five-colored sticky rice, rice sticks or rice dumplings, bringing gifts such as turbans for lovers, new shoes with thousand needles and so on, especially without elaborate embroidered hydrangeas. People in groups of three or five in the green bushes sing mountain songs, praise couples, praise each other, courtship, and at the same time sing the holiness and beauty of the hundred flower fairies. Singing intoxicated, the woman with infinite tenderness, throws the hydrangea ball like a rainbow to her sweetheart. According to traditional customs, people throw hydrangea balls from all sides to the kapok branches, so there are colorful "lightning bolts", which is dazzling. After throwing, the colorful balls on the kapok tree are full of colored balls, like fairy neon clothes. In this way, people commemorate the Hundred Flowers Fairy and pray for the Blessing of the Hundred Flower Fairy.
2. Red appreciation: paste red paper strips or hang red cloth strips, cut red paper flags
The Flower Dynasty Festival has organized "red appreciation" activities. Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Shanghai, Hubei, Hunan, Jiangxi and other regions of the flower festival has a "red appreciation" activity. In Jiangsu, people who plant flowers and trees must paste red notes on the branches of flowers or hang red cloth strips and cut red paper flags, called "flower protectors". In Hangzhou, Zhejiang, the twelfth day of the second month of the lunar calendar is the day of the hundred peanuts, and the paper paste is hung on the flower tree in the shape of a flower basket, and there are also only sticky red paper strips, or entangled in the branches of flowers and trees, inserted in pots. These activities have the meaning of wishing flowers and trees prosperity and longevity.
3. Steamed Flower Cake: Neighbors give each other each other to enhance friendship
Flower Festival, every household steamed hundred flower cake. Hundred flower cakes are the specialty of the Flower Festival, where people pick fresh petals and sticky rice flour to make with their families, which is more festive. After doing a good job, neighbors give gifts to each other and enhance friendship.
4. Eat the loin cake: Steam the rice cake and pray for good health
Waist cake is actually a cake made of ordinary rice flour, that is, made of glutinous rice flour into a flat, oval shape, slightly concave in the middle, like a human waist-like collapse cake. Shanghai, Zhejiang and other places steamed rice cakes in the Hua Dynasty Festival, fried in the next rice cake oil, in order to seek a tough waist plate, endurance of labor, so called "support cake". I thought that I could not have waist pain after eating, so I named it "waist cake". It means praying that there will be no waist pain throughout the year.