All about Chinese festival (2), traditional foods!

To be honest, the foods are actually my favorite part, and the part that I’m actually excited for during every festival.

It is Qing Ming today, however, Qing Ming is not a festival that people celebrate with happiness, it’s a festival that’s used to visit the grave and do memorials. Qing Ming was actually a pretty serious and heavy topic, and people never say “Happy Qing Ming festival”, because it is not happy.

Anyway, I don’t really want to talk abut those sad topics, since it is already a pretty sad day, so I want to write a little more about what I’ve been talking about two weeks ago, the 24 traditional festival stuffs. Today I will be writing some brief introduction about traditional foods.

While there’s differences between culture and cultures, there’s also differences for geographic stuff, so the time and representative for these festivals on geographic might various. However, there’s always better to have one more festival for people to celebrate and share happiness with friends or families about. Then, how can we celebrate those festivals that’s created for seasons? Well, there’s different and delicious foods people eats on these holidays, and here I will be talking about some festival that myself had experienced about, and what me and my family had eat.    

Spring festival

Vernal Equinox/Chunfen: At this date people eat sweet dumplings, we usually make those dumplings by ourself. Those dumplings are round, and with red beans inside, they make people feel warm, and wish to have a good start of this beautiful year. 

Grain rain/Guyu: The celebration for this holiday was the easiest, we eat grain or rice. This is the day when some kinds of vegetables begins to be on sell, and it totally gets in to the mood of spring and everything’s alive with energy.

Summer Festival

Start of Summer/Lixia: In this festival, we eat a kind of salt made egg, it’s really good! Some old Chinese people think that eating egg at summer is good for human being and it makes people full of energy. Well, I don’t know if it really will make people more energetic, however, the egg was great. 

Xiaoman: This is the festival of my least favorite, but my mom loves it, because, at this festival, we eat vegetable to celebrate! If only vegetable, that’s still in the okay range, but no, except vegetable, it also prefer us to eat bitter vegetable, that’s definitely not nice. 

Summer solstice/Xiazhi: At this festival, we eat noodles. Even though noodle as a food is pretty usual, but think about in a hot summer night, when you are hungry, and you have a hot spicy noodle to eat, it’s definitely great. There’s actually legend story behind this about why we eat noodles this day, but it’s sad I only remember how tasty the noodles are and I don’t remember about the story. 

Major Heat/Dashu: At this festival, we usually eat a Taiwan desert called Xiancao, it taste sweet and soft like jelly, but it’s made out of plants so it’s healthy. We usually eat it with nuts or beens, and a bow of milk tea together, it’s always the best of summer. 

Autum Festival

Start of Autumn/Liqiu: At this day of festival, we usually eat watermelon. Watermelon’s the fruit that usually represents summer, but her at the end of the summer, and here, it means that we’ve already been through a long and hot summer, and now’s facing the coolness. 

White Dew/Bailu: This is the festival for another fruit——litchi. Elder said that there’s many goods to eat litchi at these days, for example it helps people to sleep better etc. 

Frost’s Descent/Shuangjiang: Well autumn has a lot of festival about fruits, and here comes another one, the festival for persimmon. Around Shuangjiang was the day for persimmon to be able to eat, and that’s the best time to have persimmon.  

Winter Festival

Start of winter/Lidong: This is the festival people that have most people to celebrate, pretty much all Chinese know that we eat dumplings this day. Dumpling is the represents of home in some ways, and have some warm dumplings at winter with family always sounds good, it made people feel the warmth inside at the beginning of the cold winter. 

Heavy snow/Daxue: There’s a kind of tradition and special meet made by Chinese, we have lots of salt and souse on pork, and put them in airtight space, waiting for about a week to make sure the source get in to the pork, after all process, get them out and eat them, you can put them in the refrigerator for a long time and they will not get stink! 

Minor Cold/Xiaohan: The food for this festival was pretty normal, cook rice. Just with meat and vegetable in it, even though it’s normal, but it’s still delicious. 

So in conclusion, what I wrote about as my experience were only a very small part of those traditions, there’s still a lot that we can explore. However, the most important and main concept of pretty much all festivals, are stay healthy and be with families.