? Ancestor worship in hometown
The scale of ancestor worship during Qingming Festival in hometown is no less than that of Spring Festival and Lantern Festival. According to the words of the elders in the village, you don’t have to come back during the holidays, that is your private matter. Visiting the graves to worship ancestors during the Qingming Festival is a business matter. If you don’t come back, you will have forgotten your roots. Under the education of this cultural concept of filial piety, since ancient times, whether you are farming in the village or doing business outside, you must appear on the graves of ancestors on Qingming Festival.
There are nine surnames in our village: Lin Nie, Li Shi, Zhang Liu, Yang and Zheng Pei. Lin is a common surname, accounting for 80% of the village's 2,000 people. The surname Nie is second, followed by the other seven surnames. It can be said that "the nine major families play a game of chess, and the surname Lin is like the Han family." Therefore, during the Qingming Festival every year, the Lin family, which dominates the village, attaches great importance to ancestor worship.
The Lin family is the descendant of Bigan. After Bigan was brutally killed by Daji, his pregnant wife fled into the mountains and gave birth to a son. The later emperor rehabilitated Bigan, and because his son was born in the forest, he gave him the surname Lin. The Lin family in my hometown is a descendant of Lin Zexu. More than three hundred years ago, a descendant of the Lin family fled from Fujian with four Lin brothers and one sister and settled here. In the mid-Qing Dynasty, there was a severe drought in Hedong, and two of the brothers fled to Shaanxi. After the descendants of the Lin family here survived the famine years, they began to flourish and multiply, growing to hundreds of people in less than a hundred years. It turned out that several families with the surname Feng and Zhang in the village were declining, and the number of people was getting smaller and smaller, and the last family was gone. From the perspective of feudal superstition, some people say that the surname Lin is a tree that takes root easily and "eats" the surnames Feng and Zhang. Among the surnames in my hometown, except for the Shi family who settled early but multiplied very slowly, the other seven surname families all came here after fleeing famine.
The importance the Lin family attaches to ancestor worship can be explained in proportion: when the two Lin brothers fled famine to Xianyang, Shaanxi Province, they got married and established a family there. Their descendants now number in the hundreds. However, generations of descendants of the Lin family in Shaanxi send representatives to Shanxi to worship their ancestors every year during the Qingming Festival. At that time, we walked on foot, and it took three days each way. The relatives in his hometown were also waiting hard for his arrival this morning. That year, people from Shaanxi who came to Shanxi to worship their ancestors got cold and fell ill on the way. They rested in an inn for a day, which delayed their visit to the graves during the Qingming Festival. After he arrived, the highest official of Lin's ancestral hall in his hometown refused to listen to the explanation and ordered him to kneel at the memorial tablets of his ancestors all night. In the middle of the night, he couldn't stand it anymore and felt that his relatives here were too harsh. He was very angry. So he looked up at the cloth Lin family tree hanging on the wall and the tablets of his ancestors placed on the table. He climbed up and pulled off the family tree on the wall, wrapped it in the tablets of his ancestors, and escaped under the cover of night. His meaning is very clear, that is, you will never worship your ancestors in Shanxi again. We can just worship our ancestors in Shaanxi. Since then, the Lin family on both sides of the Taiwan Strait have lost contact. This also caused the Lin family in their hometown to have no family tree. It wasn't until 2018 that seven or eight representatives of the Lin family's descendants from Fuzhuang Village, Jingyang County, Xianyang City, Shaanxi Province, came again on Tomb Sweeping Day. The descendants of the Lin family on both sides of the Taiwan Strait jointly worshiped the tombs of their ancestors. But the family tree that the two Lin brothers from Shaanxi took away was also lost.
? The Lin family’s visit to the tombs of their hometown to worship their ancestors is divided into four steps: the first step is to visit the Shangguan tomb. The existing and enshrined tombs of Lin's ancestors are divided into two places, one in the east of the village and the other in the north of the village. The two tombs are like two hills. Each covers an area of ??more than three acres. The reason why the grave bag is so big is that for hundreds of years, the descendants of the Lin family went to the Yellow River beach ten miles away every year during the Qingming Festival to add yellow sand on their backs. This shows that people have respect and love for their ancestors from generation to generation. At dawn on the day we went to the grave, the sound of firecrackers sounded in the alleyway calling for people to gather. After nearly a thousand men of the Lin family gathered together, under the leadership of the leader, they came to the two large tombs one after another. Then they burned incense and paper and drank libations. Finally, with the sound of fierce firecrackers, everyone knelt down in unison. Kowtow devoutly. This scene is indeed very solemn and spectacular. The second step in worshiping ancestors is to worship in ancestral hall tombs. The Lin family in the village has had several ancestral halls throughout its history. After visiting the official tomb, people from each ancestral hall began to visit the tomb in their own ancestral hall. Before going to the tomb in the ancestral hall, the headman must collect the "admission fee" on behalf of the ancestral hall. If any family has a new child after the Qingming Festival last year, they will have to pay the entrance fee on this day. Generally boys are charged twice as much as girls. This money is used for two purposes. One is to take out part of it, buy twists and candies, and distribute them to everyone when they go to the ancestral hall to reflect the harmonious family atmosphere; the other is to keep part of it and buy some pots, bowls, grates, iron pots for the ancestral hall, who owns the ancestral hall? Free for weddings and weddings. The third step is to go to the grave of the family, that is, the family members who are related by blood within the fifth or sixth server. After the family's ancestors' graves have been laid, the fourth step is to go to their own private graves. This is where we go to pay homage to our deceased great-grandfather, great-grandmother, grandparents and parents.
Worshiping ancestors during the Qingming Festival may be simpler and less time-consuming in other places, but here we have to carry out at least from early in the morning to after 12 noon. And it must be the Qingming Festival. Except for the eight surnames except Lin, except for the official tomb, the same is true for other forms of ancestor worship.
The ancestor worship in my hometown is so cumbersome and strict, but it also shows that future generations will always commemorate their ancestors.
At the same time, it is also a reflection of the continuity and cohesion of the big family. In the hearts of the villagers, there is such a concept: without our ancestors, how would we be, without our parents, how would our descendants be, and without everyone, how would we be able to have a small family? Therefore, no matter how troublesome or burdensome it is, people will not hesitate to do it.