Knowledge about the Spring Festival

Under the background of intangible cultural heritage protection, the inheritance problem of the current Spring Festival custom mainly lies in the failure to complete the transformation from agricultural civilization to modern civilization, and its cultural connotation and festival-keeping method still do not conform to modern society.

Many urban teenagers think that the Spring Festival is "too chaotic", with complicated customs and rules. Some middle-aged people feel that giving gifts and lucky money is too expensive, and they are at a loss during the holidays.

In my opinion, this negative opinion is not because the custom itself is not suitable for modern society, but because of the relevant strategies adopted in the process of China's transformation from traditional society to modern society in modern times, which makes traditional festivals fail to adapt to social changes and make necessary innovations. In modern society, if the Spring Festival wants to flourish, it must make necessary adjustments and have a strong enough modernity.

At this stage, in addition to the automatic renewal of folk customs according to lifestyle changes, relevant government departments, academia and other social forces should consider strengthening the modernity elements of Spring Festival customs in the following three aspects:

First, refine and publicize the modern cultural connotation of traditional customs. There is no contradiction between the modernity of festival cultural connotation and the reasonable existence of some traditional customs. On the one hand, some ancient customs with characteristics have the significance of display and commemoration in modern society itself; On the other hand, these old customs will be reborn.

The original meaning of the Chinese New Year is to sacrifice to the gods and practice witchcraft at the turn of the New Year. This custom and connotation will inevitably decline gradually in modern times, while a few related customs have become a means to create a grand, festive and peaceful holiday atmosphere and a way for people to express their ideal of a stable and prosperous life. For example, setting off firecrackers, which was originally a ceremony to enlighten the spirit or exorcise evil spirits, has now become a way to celebrate. Other festivals and customs, such as posting couplets, observing the new year, welcoming the new year and suppressing the new year, can also be similarly explained.

It can be said that the Spring Festival has adapted to the evolution of modern society to a certain extent, resulting in new folk customs that modern people like, such as watching the Spring Festival Evening on New Year's Eve, and residents setting off more ornamental fireworks instead of paying attention to sound firecrackers. The evolution of New Year greetings is more representative. The traditional way to pay New Year's greetings is to visit relatives and bow down. At present, only a few rural areas still have the etiquette of bowing down to pay New Year greetings, and most areas have changed from visiting their homes to paying New Year greetings by telephone and text messages.

The large-scale Spring Festival temple fairs held in some cities are successful examples of the combination of traditional customs and modern life. In recent years, every Spring Festival in Beijing, temple fairs are held in Ditan, longtan lake, Baiyunguan, Liulichang and other public places, which are very popular with the masses. There are crowds of people at the temple fair almost every day. In the past, temple fairs were large gatherings developed on the basis of offering sacrifices to God and praying for blessings. At present, temple fairs mainly focus on entertainment, entertainment and trade, and there are few sacrificial activities. Sacrificial ceremonies in temple fairs such as Ditan and Tiantan are only performances, but there are no sacrificial activities in temple fairs such as Liulichang and Millennium Monument. Of course, due to the social and environmental factors in these years, the Spring Festival has not completed the modern transformation well, and its modernity still needs to be strengthened.

Second, develop and publicize Spring Festival memorials to create a romantic and vivid holiday atmosphere. Holiday souvenirs, or holiday symbols, refer to things that can represent holiday characteristics, such as jiaozi, firecrackers, lanterns, couplets, Laba porridge, Kitchen God, zodiac animals and so on.

Festival memorial hall has three functions in the construction of traditional festival modernity:

Maintain people's holiday feelings and enrich people's holiday activities. Traditional festivals have been passed down for thousands of years and accumulated relatively stable national feelings in the hearts of ethnic members. This is manifested in the fact that during festivals, if individual members don't abide by some traditional customs, such as not being able to reunite with their families on New Year's Eve, they will feel emotionally lost and feel that their life on New Year's Day is not perfect. However, this kind of festival emotion is not unconditionally passed down from generation to generation, and it needs to be passed down with the help of specific ceremonies and activities in the festival.

In traditional society, people's specific ceremonies or activities in festivals are often driven by related beliefs or maintained by certain cultural needs. However, in modern society, there are few cultural needs that are compatible with agricultural civilization, so many festival ceremonies and festivals are difficult to inherit, which makes festivals show a state of reduced festivals and customs.

In this case, the use of holiday memorials becomes very important for maintaining holiday traditions. In traditional society, these holiday memorials are just tools for holiday activities, but in modern society, they often become the axis and driving force of holiday activities. This is because these festival memorials condense the spirit of national culture and become the sustenance of people's holiday feelings and an important carrier of holiday characteristics; These holiday memorials are also used from generation to generation, and the behavior patterns around these memorials have become the main content of holiday activities.

Create a strong festive atmosphere. Festivals are an unusual moment for people, and people have festive atmosphere and activities. In traditional society or rural areas where many traditional customs are preserved, people's sense of solemnity or sacredness in festivals is generally brought by sacrificial ceremonies. For example, in the countryside of Jingxian County, Hebei Province, before the New Year's Eve dinner, all men will go to the graveyard to invite their ancestors home to eat jiaozi for the New Year. After the ceremony of inviting the gods is completed, the ancestors are invited home. At this time, people realize the existence of God at home, and the atmosphere at home becomes extremely solemn, and they are very cautious in speaking and doing things. For example, when cooking jiaozi, adults will tell children not to say unlucky things like "broken" and "not enough", but to say lucky things like "earned" and "left over".

In modern society, in cities and many rural areas, folk beliefs have faded, and there are no sacrificial ceremonies on major festivals. If other festivals are not used to make up for the lack of ceremonies, festivals will often become deserted. In this case, holiday memorials come in handy. It is an important way to create a festive atmosphere, especially the main way to create an externally visible festive atmosphere. Therefore, in modern society, our "unusual" feeling of holiday time comes from the significance of those specific days in our memory, mainly from the rendering of the environment by these holiday monuments and the custom activities of using them.

The smooth inheritance of traditional festivals in modern society depends on the promotion of holiday commemorative consumer market. In the traditional period, holiday activities were mainly carried out within the family, with few public activities, and holiday supplies were mainly made by themselves. In modern society, family activities are reduced, holiday products are mainly purchased from the market, and the sociality and publicity of holiday methods are enhanced. The public activities and cultural consumption of festivals depend on the operation and promotion of businesses to a great extent, and the related consumption of holiday souvenirs is the main way and goal of business operation. Businessmen play an important role in promoting the inheritance of modern festivals.

In recent years, with the rise of foreign festivals in China, the promotion of merchants has played an important role. Even the hype of merchants can change the theme of the festival and produce a brand-new festival. For example, there is no Santa Claus in Christmas in the west. Later, due to the role of businessmen, Christmas almost became a holiday around Santa Claus. At present, we do not fully use memorial halls when celebrating traditional festivals, but in terms of quantity, quality and scale of use, it is still insufficient. In the grand Spring Festival, more commemorative items are used, which to a great extent plays a role in creating a lively and festive holiday atmosphere. Its disadvantage is that it is old-fashioned and lacks modern flavor.

Third, strengthen and expand the entertainment and publicity of traditional folk customs. Most of our traditional festivals had rich and interesting customs and activities before and after the Tang and Song Dynasties, but after the Ming and Qing Dynasties, influenced by Confucian culture and Neo-Confucianism, they paid too much attention to etiquette and enlightenment, and in modern times they became more monotonous, and there were too few outdoor entertainment festivals.

Among the traditional festivals in China, Lantern Festival is the most entertaining and the most public activity. Now the Lantern Festival is regarded as a part of the Spring Festival, the end and climax of the Spring Festival. In ancient times, the core of the cultural connotation of Lantern Festival was to offer sacrifices to Taiyi God (Polaris God) and pray for a bumper harvest and future generations.

In contemporary society, the custom of offering sacrifices to stars, praying for the New Year and praying for children has declined, and the spirit of its custom of saving the world can be summed up as cherishing and loving life and expressing people's wishes for prosperity and reunion. The prosperous Lantern Festival in the old society can be regarded as the carnival in China. All kinds of large-scale celebrations and entertainment activities are full of the carnival spirit of the people, so it is called "Lantern Festival". The festival activities of Lantern Festival focus on almost all large-scale traditional entertainment and celebration methods: decorating lanterns, beating gongs and drums, dancing dragons and lions, yangko, singing operas, guessing games and so on. Lantern Festival Lantern Festival, singing opera, yangko, dragon and lion dances are all mass public activities held in the community. Good and orderly public celebrations can enhance people's public awareness, community identity and collective honor, and help to create a harmonious atmosphere in the community.

Although the evolution and transformation of traditional festivals mainly depend on their own mechanism and vitality, and on people's natural inheritance and independent choice, historical experience at home and abroad shows that the problem is not that simple, and external intervention can also play a great role in the rise and fall of festivals. The weakness of traditional festivals at present is largely the result of external intervention in the past. Now it is necessary to use traditional festivals to promote excellent national culture, which is advocated by government public opinion and give traditional festivals more holidays. This is a powerful policy intervention. Of course, there should be more systematic and complete measures for external intervention. Generally speaking, it is necessary to enhance the position of traditional culture in modern mainstream culture, enhance people's cultural consciousness, and gradually eliminate the complex of worshipping foreign things and obsessing foreign things. Only in this way can we fundamentally create a humanistic environment conducive to the prosperity of traditional festivals, and it is also the basis and motivation for its modernity to breed and grow.

On the fifteenth day of the first month, the most lively is the Lantern Festival. This picture of the Lantern Festival in Qing Dynasty shows the market at that time.

Internationalization of Spring Festival and Inheritance of Customs

In recent years, the internationalization trend of the Spring Festival has become a noticeable cultural phenomenon.

In fact, the internationalization of customs in the old calendar year began as early as ancient times, especially in the powerful Tang Dynasty. In the Tang Dynasty, China's summer calendar and traditional festivals and customs spread to the Korean Peninsula, Japan, Vietnam and other East Asian regions, and were adopted by these countries. Up to today, the annual customs and festivals originated from China's old calendar are still very grand in North Korea, South Korea and Viet Nam, and enjoy a long holiday. 1872, Japan changed to the western calendar and moved the traditional customs to the western New Year's Day. Chinese communities that migrated to other countries in past dynasties also maintained the traditional Chinese New Year custom, which is another aspect of the internationalization of the Spring Festival.

Wanderers and overseas Chinese in foreign countries, while integrating into the local society, attach great importance to celebrating the festivals of the motherland with traditional customs, so as to comfort their humanistic feelings in the motherland, and also show their cultural identity to different cultural groups around them and show their cultural characteristics.

In recent years, with the remarkable promotion of China's international status, overseas Chinese have become more and more vocal in celebrating the Year of China in different cultural societies, attracting more and more non-Chinese to watch and participate in China New Year activities, and China New Year has been more and more respected and even accepted by the local mainstream society.

Overseas Chinese pay special attention to the publicity of performances during the Spring Festival and show the existence of China cultural groups to local people in public places with ethnic characteristics. Therefore, dragon dancing, lion dancing, drumming and setting off firecrackers, which are distinctive cultural symbols of China and can attract people's attention, are especially favored by China people. They also absorb some festivals commonly used in local society, such as parades, which are very powerful. In 2004, new york declared "China Lunar New Year" as a state holiday. Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Brunei, Mauritius and other countries also set up public holidays for local Chinese to celebrate the Spring Festival. Since 2007, whenever the Lunar New Year comes in China, the Canadian government has issued a set of commemorative stamps on the zodiac, and this year, it also launched a stamp on the zodiac in the Year of the Ox. On the eve of the Spring Festival this year, the Brazilian government also issued a stamp with "Golden Bull". This is the third time that the Brazilian Post Office has issued China Lunar New Year stamps after year of the snake and Year of the Horse stamps. All these examples show that the Spring Festival celebration is regarded as a distinctive symbol of the ethnic culture to which overseas Chinese belong, and the respect and acceptance of the Spring Festival in China by the local mainstream society is also a symbol, expressing the recognition of Chinese contributions and respect for Chinese culture.

Traditional festivals are a grand symbolic national culture, which can significantly reflect the national cultural characteristics, strongly influence other ethnic groups' attention and understanding of the culture with Chinese characteristics, and are also a convenient window for different cultural groups to understand the culture with Chinese characteristics. Some people say that Spring Festival travel rush's internationalization shows that China's soft power and influence in the world have been significantly enhanced, which is very reasonable.

Compared with other parts of culture, the inheritance of folk culture relies more on oral teaching and handed down from generation to generation. Take the custom of Chinese New Year as an example. How many of our impressions and habits about Chinese New Year are learned from books? Didn't you follow your elders for the New Year since childhood? The key to this way of inheritance is that it cannot be dated. Nowadays, many people worry that teenagers don't like our traditional festivals and are keen on western festivals. Is this because traditional festivals are really not suitable for modern society?

Russell famously said that unequal polymorphism is the source of happiness. Here I want to paraphrase: cultural diversity is the source of human civilization and progress. If there is only one culture in the world, it must be a very bad thing. Only by maintaining their own cultural characteristics can all ethnic groups maintain the pattern of cultural diversity in the world. Our traditional festivals are a part of China's characteristic culture and cannot be discarded for the above reasons. Judging from the examples and theories of cultural development around the world, after adjustment and renewal, it can fully adapt to and benefit modern society. In my opinion, the relationship between foreign festivals and traditional festivals is just like the relationship between foreign fast food and Chinese food. We can absorb several foreign festivals with characteristics, but we can only use them to enrich our festival system, and we can't throw away our traditional festivals at the same time. McDonald's doesn't like to switch to Beijing Roast Duck, but if it doesn't love foreign festivals, it may not be able to return to traditional festivals, because the intangible cultural heritage of traditional festivals is different from material things, and it is difficult to find a group's holiday customs if they are lost.