What are the customs of Qingming Festival in your hometown?

My hometown is a small county in Gansu. It is surrounded on three sides by the Badain Jaran Desert + Tengger Desert.

In my hometown, during the Qingming Festival, there were only pure visits to graves and paper burning, and no other activities.

It should be because it is the farming season in the north and there is no more free time!

However, there are still many things to pay attention to when visiting graves during the Qingming Festival.

The first is the time to visit the grave. It must be 3-5 days before Qingming Festival. So Qingming Festival is a busy time for us here in farming and visiting graves!

For married daughters who have to visit their parents’ graves, time is rushed to attend school, especially those who are far away!

I remember when I was a child, my mother once took me to burn paper for my grandpa. She took me out of the hot bed before dawn in the morning. I didn’t want to put on clothes, so she hugged me randomly and stuffed me with a quilt. On the way to the donkey cart, he kept shouting and beating, asking the donkey to run faster!

Only now do I understand that it was the third day before Qingming, the last day to burn paper. The custom in our place is that paper burning during the Qingming Festival must be done before the Qingming Festival actually starts, usually before 11 o'clock. In fact, when we burned the paper, the sun had just risen, but my mother kept nagging: I am so lazy that I stayed on the kang for a long time and couldn't get up...

Why should we pay attention to the sun rising? People have been burning paper since childhood. Legend has it that after this point, people continue to burn paper. Later generations will be very lazy and their lives will not be as good as others!

Hey, my precious daughter always loves to stay in bed. Do you want her to get up in the middle of the night to visit the grave? !

Another traditional and special custom is that the paper-burning sacrifice must be bean (that is, green beans that everyone can buy in supermarkets or food stores) steamed buns. Therefore, in an era when production technology was relatively backward, planting beans was a big deal. If the bean harvest was not good, the ancestors would "starve"! This is still a trivial matter, but to be laughed at by everyone as "starving our ancestors to death" is even more embarrassing and humiliating to our ancestors!

(The size of steamed buns is similar to that of steamed buns, and the flesh generally accounts for more than half of the volume of the buns)

The number of steamed buns is also very particular, and must be sixteen. Fifteen are used to burn paper. I still don’t understand what the other one is for.

I was greedy at that time, and I had to wait until the paper was burned before I could eat the other fifteen, so I kept trying hard to find where to put that one, but no matter how hard I looked, I still couldn’t find it, so I asked my mother, She never told me. At first I thought it was my mother or brother who ate it!

Later I found out that my mother threw me on the roof! So I have always hated my mother, why didn’t she give it to me and threw it on the roof? It wasn't until one year when I checked the county annals that I found out that the food thrown on the roof was eaten by hawks and sparrows (pronounced wa here). It meant thanking them for eating bugs, mice and other pests and protecting the farmers' good harvests. I hope they will do so in the future. Keep eating more bugs and more!

There is another custom that requires you not to cry when visiting graves during Qingming Festival!

I heard other people’s opinions and some records in county annals. The reason is that life was hard in those days and there was little food to eat. By Qingming Festival, there was basically nothing to eat! If you cry in front of your ancestors, you are complaining that you have nothing to eat! It’s a sign of being incompetent and not knowing how to get by! Or let your ancestors enjoy a big meal in peace and quiet, so that they can survive the difficult days of eating less and the lean years ahead! (Going to the grave after the Qingming Festival will last until July and a half, it’s such a long day!)

Another way to make bean buns is to put four red dots on them, or put a dot with your finger. In my hometown, four and one are basically numbers used for sacrifices, but no one will ever know the specific difference between the two. This kind of steamed buns is not for going to graves, but for worshiping at home, which is a real offering!

Sacrifice at home is usually held in the upper room, which is the house directly opposite the street door. Every house in this house will have a table at the front door, which is specially used for worship.

Putting fifteen steamed buns on the table is an art, a technology, and even mathematics!

The layers of buns must be arranged to look good, and the number of layers and the number of each layer must be fixed! Anyway, I couldn’t figure it out after studying it!

However, when I was a child, every time it was put out, the biggest temptation for me was of course when I could eat it!

In my hometown, the red dots on the offerings are very particular, and only the elders can eat the red dots, so it seems a bit precious! (However, it seems that in most cases they were cut off and sacrificed). Hey, I tasted it secretly and it was bitter and not delicious at all! The reason is that the colors are made from the flowers of the plant, and they smell slightly fragrant, but they are not so fun to eat!

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Regarding the red dots on the product, parents also have a folk saying: Do you think the red dots on the old lady's offering are eaten in vain!

Aaah! The one who can guess is the experienced driver!