The Spring Festival.
It is the first day of the first month of the lunar calendar, also known as the lunar year, commonly known as "New Year". It is one of the grandest and most lively traditional festivals in China. The history of the Spring Festival is very long, it originated in the Yin Shang period at the end of the year the gods and ancestors activities.
Another name for the Spring Festival is New Year. In the legends of the past, the year was an imaginary animal that brought bad luck to people. When the year came. Trees wither and no grass grows; once the year passes, everything grows and flowers are everywhere. How can the year pass? Need to blast with firecrackers, so there is the custom of burning firecrackers, which is actually another way to set off a lively scene.
In ancient times, people from the end of the year 23 or 24 of the sacrificial stove will begin to "busy year", the New Year to the first month of the 19th before the end. In modern times, people set the Spring Festival on the first day of the first month of the lunar calendar, but generally at least until the first month of the fifteenth New Year's Day is considered to be over. The Spring Festival is a festival of joy and harmony, a gathering of family and friends, and a bond that deepens people's feelings. The exchange of greetings during the festival conveys the ethic of kinship between friends and relatives, which is an important element in sustaining the development of the Spring Festival.
The origin of ancient traditional festivals is related to ancient primitive beliefs, sacrificial culture, and humanistic and natural cultural elements such as the sky and the calendar. According to the research results of modern anthropology and archaeology, the two most primitive beliefs of human beings are the belief in heaven and earth and the belief in ancestors.
About the origin of the Spring Festival, in the old days, due to the lack of literature in the ancient times (Qin Shi Huang burned the books, or other reasons) can not be directly proved its origin, in the inheritance of the development of the many legends that have arisen. Among them, there are several popular sayings, the Spring Festival originated from the ancient "Lunar Sacrifice", from "witchcraft rituals", from "Ghost Festival", from "Ancient Harvest Sacrifice". Ancient harvest rituals", from "Shun following the tribal alliance leader said", from "Wannian youth created Wannian calendar said", from avoiding the "year" beast of the The legend of the "Nian" beast and so on.