Monday, April 03, 2006
The Qingming Festival or Qing Ming Jie is one of the 24 segments in Chinese Calendar. It normally falls on the 4th or 5th of April because it's depended on the Cold Food Day (105 days after previous year's winter solstice). In the old days, Ching Ming was celebrated 3 days after the Cold Food Day but Cold Food Day was shorted to one day and then abandoned. So nowadays, Ching Ming and Cold Food Day fall on the same day although no one celebrate Cold Food Day any more. Ching Ming is also known as "Remembrance of Ancestors Day" or 'Grave/Tomb Sweeping Day'.
I remember when I was little, we have to carry incense sticks, joss sticks and paper offerings like paper money and paper clothes and any other paper accessories, depends how serious your family is with this thing.
Sweeping the graves of one's ancestors is something descendents do as a sign of respect. A proper sweeping consists of three steps: cleaning the grave, making offerings to ancestors and burning ceremonial money.
Cleaning the grave was just what it sounds like - removing weeds, making necessary repairs, and repainting the gravestone engravings. After the clean up, families made offerings of meat and fruit to the guardian spirit of the graveyard (Hou Tu) followed by incense offerings to their ancestors.
All paper offerings will be burnt for they believe that the relatives can receive the goods and even 'money' this way. Unlike the sacrifices at a family's home altar, the offerings at the tomb usually consist of dry, bland food. One theory is that since any number of ghosts rome around a grave area, the less appealing food will be consumed by the ancestors, and not be plundered by strangers.
As time pass, will this QingMing Festival survive?
On this festival, I still miss very much my close ex-boss who perish in the Asian Tsunami and my ex-colleague who pass away peacefully after suffering from a rare undetected heart attack. Life is so fragile & you won't know what will happen tomorrow.. hence, cherish the present and what had happen is a yester-day.
sMurFy at ... [ 10:40 PM ]
================================================================
================================================================
