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Hungry Ghost Festival
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zhongyuan Festival, its popular name Hungry Ghost Festival, is also a folk traditional festival, which falls on the 14th or 15th of the seventh lunar month.
On this special day, each and every family without exception is making sacrifices to their ancestors. And some of them are even holding a family banquet, performing acts of enshrining and worshiping ceremony. After the drinking has gone through three rounds, the ancestor feast is finished, and the whole family encircles and sit at the table to have their festival dinner.
After dark, the family will go to a quiet riverside or a flat ground with prepared firecrackers, paper money, joss sticks and candles. There they are scattering lime power into a circle, representing a no-go area or a forbidden zone. After sprinkling some water and food in the circle, they are burning some paper money, and setting off firecrackers, respectfully seeing off forefathers on the way to dark hell.
In the past, people would meet forefathers' soul and ghost home through a set of sacrifice-offering ceremonies on the seventh of seventh lunar month. And then, they offered tea and rice to forefathers three times each morning, noon, and evening, until they returned the soul and ghost on the 15th of the seventh lunar month.
But nowadays, people have eliminated some of superstition and kept down the forms of making sacrifices, cherishing the memory and recollection of our forefathers.
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Post comment Comment (8 replies)
- Reply ly.identity
- Is it today? At the first sight of your entry's title, I misunderstood it as "饿鬼节".
- Reply Arlene.Xie
- when i was a child, i was extremly fear for that.
- Reply littlegrass
- ly.identity: Is it today? At the first sight of your entry's title, I misunderstood it as "饿鬼节".Yeah, today it's Hungry Ghost Festival, and offer our sincerest sacrifice to our forefathers.
- Reply littlegrass
- Arlene.Xie: when i was a child, i was extremly fear for that.Me too, but what attracted me most was the delicious rice and food, fear is less than that.
- Reply medi
- it's the first time i know the name of hungry ghost. i was only familiar with zhongyuan festival in the past...
- Reply littlegrass
- medi: it's the first time i know the name of hungry ghost. i was only familiar with zhongyuan festival in the past...Nowdadys people celebrate the festival less than the past.
- Reply crefendool
- The name is cute
- Reply littlegrass
- crefendool: The name is cute
