What's the date today?

Source of the manuscript: Shijiazhuang News Network sang the folk song "Twenty-three, Melon Sticks, Chef Master Heaven". This year's annual flavor is getting heavier and heavier, and a series of anniversary activities have begun. Today is the 23rd of the twelfth lunar month. Let's start with this "23". How to offer sacrifices to the stove on the 23rd of the twelfth lunar month ■ Xie Zhiwei 23rd, honeydew melons are sticky, and the kitchen god wants to go to heaven. This is well known. There is another saying in Shijiazhuang: honeydew melons offer sacrifices to stoves, and the Spring Festival is here. Xiao Ni 'er wants flowers, boys want guns, old people want felt hats, and old women want to prick their feet. On the 23rd of the twelfth lunar month, the "Year" will begin to pass, and on this day, the kitchen will be sacrificed. In the past, every kitchen was dedicated to the chef. Kitchen God is white-faced, kind-hearted, and has five long beards hanging over his chest. Next to her is Grandma Chef Wang, smiling. The couplets on both sides of the statue are: Heaven speaks well, and you will be safe when you return to the palace. According to folklore, Kitchen God was originally a star in the sky. Because he made a mistake, he was demoted to the world by the Jade Emperor and became an "oriental chef". It sits in the middle of the kitchen stoves of every household, observes people's lives and behaviors, and records all the good and bad things in detail. On the 23rd day of the twelfth lunar month, he reported to the Jade Emperor about the good and evil of each family, and returned to earth on the 30th night of the twelfth lunar month to punish evil and promote good according to the Jade Emperor's will. Therefore, on the 23rd of the twelfth lunar month, people will offer sacrifices to the kitchen god, give him sticky and sweet honeydew melons, and stick his mouth, so that he can "speak well in heaven and go back to the palace to keep safe". At the beginning of the sacrifice, three incense sticks were lit in the incense burner under the kitchen god, and hearth cakes, sesame candy, honeydew melons, two bowls of white water and two bowls of sorghum were offered. Pastry is for the kitchen god and grandma, and sorghum and white water are for the kitchen god's horse. The horse, satiated with food and drink, carried the kitchen god and grandma to heaven and reported to the jade emperor. At this time, it is necessary to "please" the God of the Kitchen God from his throne and put him in front of the kitchen pit. Everyone knelt down, lit incense paper and melted together. At the same time, pray: "Kitchen God, Grandma Kitchen King, eat and drink well, and go to heaven today. When you get to heaven, say more good things, talk less empty words, forgive some mistakes, and forgive some things you can't take care of. Burn more incense for your old man in the coming year and bless our whole family. " Then set off firecrackers to see the kitchen god off. This is called "Heaven". Everyone kowtowed, rejoiced and shared honeydew melons. On New Year's Eve, Kitchen God was invited to the throne. On the 23rd of the twelfth lunar month, honeydew melons offer sacrifices to the stove, which is lively, grand and humorous, so this day is also called "Chinese New Year". Besides, honeydew melon ■ Zhang Xinguo, no matter how popular the advertisements of imported toffee are, no matter how fancy the assorted chocolates are, there is always a local sugar and liquor bar in the rural market along the torrential coast and even in the street shops in the provincial capital, which is bare, original and attractive. There is no distinction between the north and the south. The offerings of the sacrificial furnace are all sticky and sweet candy, but the colors, tastes and shapes are different. Glutinous rice glue sugar in Jiangsu and Zhejiang is square in shape and pure yellow in color; Sorghum caramel, Qilu land, long and red in the night. Melons were only found in the fields of ancient Zhili, either as big as Yuanxiao or as small as Ginkgo biloba. It is not only as white as sheep fat, but also strangely hollow. Beauty lies in the unique shape of "melon": or it is round, like the embryonic form of watermelon; Or oval grains, like delicate cantaloupes; The fine vertical stripes on the surface layer are clear, more like beautiful strip spots on the melon skin, which is wonderful. Melon is processed from maltose and originated from the former Zhengding government. This is a dessert made by villagers with a technology that has been passed down for thousands of years. The highland barley here is rich in strings of beads, which not only smells delicious when cooking, but also makes sugar sweet. Germinating barley, fermenting in a vat, namely diluting sugar, stretching and kneading, cutting and molding, and drying to obtain honeydew melon. This melon is crisp at the first bite, so crisp that it falls off; It's sticky when chewed, and it's too sticky to open your mouth. Therefore, the nickname is also called "the old man is happy": the joy is that the teeth can still be chewed, and the joy is that the chin should be opened hard, such as laughing. Every family has a hard book to read, but it melts like a melon. The quarrel between knocking on pots and touching bowls is always in the eyes of the monarch of China, so stick honeydew melon on his mouth and let him pray for the world when he reports to China. Or shut his mouth and cut the crap. Kitchen God enjoys honeydew melons every year. Although he has been fooled many times and stuck to that provocative mouth, he will always remember the crisp and sweet strange beauty, his heart will always itch, and he will always remember the mouth of the twelfth lunar month. Slight bitterness makes honeydew melon mellow, just like the days of cultivators, bitterness contains sweetness. Twenty-three, honeydew melon is sticky. In fact, this honeydew melon not only sticks to the talkative mouth of Kitchen God, but also sweetens the heart of the whole family. It is sweet enough for a family to share the sweetness of honeydew melon. Kitchen God's "Past Life" ■ Wu Zhengzhi's so-called sacrifice to the kitchen stove is the sacrifice to the kitchen stove. Kitchen God was written as "Kitchen God" in ancient China literature, commonly known as "Kitchen God". It is said that Kitchen God is a god who can "speak well in heaven and bring good luck in the underworld". Today, this is obviously an absurd superstition. But literally, Kitchen God should be the god who invented and took charge of cooking stoves on earth. But strangely, the written records and folklore of past dynasties show that the worship of the kitchen god has nothing to do with its literal meaning, and there is far more than one image of the kitchen god. The custom of offering sacrifices to stoves has existed in China since the Zhou Dynasty. One of the seven kinds of sacrifices in the Zhou Dynasty was to worship the "stove". According to Xu Shen's Five Classics and Different Meanings in the Eastern Han Dynasty, Zhu Rong, the god of fire, was the kitchen god that people sacrificed. The invention of the stove is closely related to the use of fire. The invention of fire made human beings enter the civilized era of cooked food from the barbaric era of eating animals and drinking blood. However, the invention of the stove made mankind enter a new stage of cooking with the stove from cooking directly with fire. The "stove" has also become a cooker that people can't live without every day. The habit of eating around the stove makes the stove a symbol of a certain group and promotes people's worship of the stove. The old saying "Kitchen God is the head of the family" seems to have its origin here. From this perspective, the statement that Zhu Rong, the Vulcan, is a kitchen god seems quite close to its literal meaning. The book "Seeking God in Jin Dynasty" said that when Emperor Xuandi of the Han Dynasty announced the Emperor, Yin Zifang often cooked in the morning of the second day of the twelfth lunar month, so he let the kitchen god appear and sacrificed the kitchen stove with antelope after the celebration banquet. Since then, he "has money at home." Later, people followed Yin Zifang's example and sacrificed the stove with antelope on the twelfth day. Many people are lucky. Here, Kitchen God is said to be a god who can make people rich. In the folklore of some places in Hebei, Kitchen God is a greedy state official. Every household should invite him and his wife, family, and even chickens and dogs to have a first-class banquet for a day, or they will rob the house and kill it. For a whole year, he ate white and fat, and the people were miserable. Later, a strongman "fanned" them home, fanned them on the wall next to the stove, and asked them to stare at every household to make good food and eat good food. In Shandong legend, Kitchen God is an ungrateful wealthy businessman. After he became a wealthy businessman, he abandoned his wife Laila, who worked hard to support his parents, and married a prostitute Haitang. Later, the family was on fire and had to beg for a living. One day, he went to his ex-wife Lilac's house and repeatedly called "Auntie" for food. When he recognized this woman as his ex-wife, Laila, he was so ashamed that he plunged into the bottom of the pot and suffocated. It is said that the Jade Emperor named him Kitchen God only because of his surname. And because the day he died was December 23 of the lunar calendar, it was designated as "Kitchen God Festival". In Henan folklore, Kitchen God is also a poor young man. He set fire to help the kitchen. Legend has it that the little girl of the Jade Emperor fell in love with the poor young man. When the Jade Emperor learned this, he was very angry. He knocked the little girl to the ground and suffered with the poor young man. The queen mother felt sorry for her daughter and interceded for her, so the jade emperor reluctantly sealed the position of the kitchen god for this poor young man. From then on, people called the poor young man the Kitchen God, and the jade emperor's little daughter naturally became the grandmother of the Kitchen God. Grandma Chef knows the hardships of the people, and often brings them back to eat and drink for the people in the name of going home to visit relatives. When the Jade Emperor learned about it, he was very angry and only allowed them to go back once a year at the end of the year. On the 23rd of the twelfth lunar month, Grandma Kitchen God skillfully dealt with the Jade Emperor and brought back dry stoves, tofu, meat and chicken for the people to eat. To commemorate the kindness of Grandma Kitchen God, people bake the stove on the 23rd of the twelfth lunar month, make tofu on the 25th, cut meat on the 26th, kill chicken on the stove on the 27th, steam steamed bread on the 28th, make wine on the 29th and pinch jiaozi on the 30th. It can be seen that the 23 rd day of the twelfth lunar month is not the kitchen god, but the grandmother of the kitchen god. There are some legends about Kitchen God. In short, there are different opinions about Kitchen God in different dynasties and regions. This situation not only shows that there is no kitchen god, but also shows that the description of kitchen god has poured into different wishes of different times.