Yuyao's Chinese New Year features include dusting, writing Spring Festival couplets, setting off firecrackers, taking photos of locusts, eating dumplings, making sugar tea, worshiping ancestors and praying for gods, performing operas and dancing dragons.
1. Dust-cleaning: cleaning the house or the surrounding area, cleaning some utensils, etc. Some villages often organize villagers to carry out large-scale cleaning to clean up weeds and garbage, which means a clean New Year.
2. Writing Spring Festival couplets: It is a well-continued traditional custom. Every year, the Municipal Calligraphers Association organizes a group of calligraphers to write Spring Festival couplets for the citizens. In the old days, Spring Festival couplets used to include many words of blessing, such as "Days increase years, people live longer, and spring is full of blessings". Today, Spring Festival couplets still write some auspicious sentences, but the contents are more novel and full of the times, and many people will paste the word "fu" upside down.
3. Setting off firecrackers: It is a very old folk custom, which means "exorcising evil spirits and praying for peace". There are firecrackers on New Year's Eve and firecrackers on the first day of the first month. In ancient times, bamboo was directly used to burn fire in Siming mountain area, because bamboo nodes would make a "bang" sound when burning. For the sake of environmental protection and safety, it is suggested to set off firecrackers as little as possible.
4 Eating dumplings: Because of its round shape, it means "round and round". Its method is exquisite, and the good glutinous rice flour is packaged as walnut-sized, with sweet fillings such as bean paste and jujube paste, salty fillings that can be vegetarian, and no fillings. If conditions are good, add walnuts, sugar, roses and osmanthus flowers as fillings, and cook or fry them more. As a kind of folk food with a long history, dumplings are deeply welcomed by ordinary people, which contains the cultural significance of "peace, blessing and auspiciousness", expresses people's yearning and appeal for a better life, and often contains deep homesickness.
Yuyao's landform:
Yuyao belongs to the intersection of the mountainous area of the eastern Zhejiang basin and the northern Zhejiang plain, with the distance between the east and west poles of 58.5 kilometers and the distance between the north and south poles of 79 kilometers. The administrative area covers an area of 1,5.8 square kilometers, and the terrain is high in the south and low in the north, with a slight depression in the middle. The southern part is Siming Mountain, with rolling hills and scattered terraces and valleys of different sizes. The highest peak, Qinghuwan Hill on Dachangshan Mountain, is 979 meters above sea level. The middle part is Yaojiang alluvial valley plain, which is dotted with arc hills, and the northern part is Qiantang River and Hangzhou Bay alluvial plain. The city has 637,8 mu of cultivated land, 93,3 mu of garden land and 782, mu of forest land, which is known as "five mountains, two waters and three fields".