Is the Winter Solstice Festival starting to count nine?

Winter Solstice Festival: The winter solstice is also called the winter festival, the winter festival, the Asian year, the Yiyang Festival, the Winter Festival or the Long Solstice Festival, which is the eleventh month of the lunar calendar, and is one of the important traditional cultural festivals in China. There is a folk saying that the winter solstice is like a big year, and the so-called winter solstice refers to the extreme point of winter.

On this day, the sun shines directly on the Tropic of Capricorn, and the days are shortest in the Northern Hemisphere, and then the direct sunlight gradually moves north, and the days become longer day by day. Therefore, there is a proverb that "after eating winter solstice noodles, a line grows in a day". The ancients believed that the winter solstice was the solstice of the cathode, and the yang energy was born, and it was regarded as the starting point of the twenty-four solar terms, which was an auspicious day

Worship ancestors, sacrifice to the god of coal kiln, rush to the temple fair, drink rice wine, eat long noodles, eat winter solstice meat, eat dumplings, eat wontons, eat winter solstice group, worship each other, called "sub-festival".

Counting Nine Songs": "Counting Nine Songs" is also called Ninety-Nine Words, and the full name should be "Ninety-Nine Chilling Song". According to the calculation of China's traditional calendar, from the next day of the winter solstice, every nine days is a time period, and this period is the "nine" opposite to the summer "volt"; There are nine "segments", the first nine days are called 19, and then they are called in turn.

Two. Nine, thirty-nine 、......Ninety-nine, collectively known as "ninety-nine", is the opposite of "three-dog". Throughout the winter, the climate is colder for 9981 days, and after this period, the weather warms up and the earth will spring. According to Liang Zongde's "Jing Chu Years Chronicles" of the Southern Dynasty, there were already nine customs at that time:

The number of days on the winter solstice and nine hundred and eighty-one days is commonly used, which is the end of the cold". The number of days on the winter solstice here is different from the current calendar, but it may be true, and later chronicles also say that the number of days on the winter solstice is nine.

When the winter solstice arrives, the "number nine" begins.

The winter solstice is one of the 24 solar terms, as opposed to the summer solstice, and the time is around December 22 of the Gregorian calendar every year. At this time, the Sun reaches the ecliptic longitude of 270°.

On the day of the winter solstice, the sun reaches the southernmost point of the year, almost directly hitting the Tropic of Capricorn. On this day, the Northern Hemisphere receives the least amount of sunlight, the days reach their shortest, and the days get shorter the further north you go.

Similarly, because the solar altitude is the lowest on the winter solstice, the sunshine hours are the shortest, and the ground absorbs less heat than it loses, and the weather is generally colder. The winter solstice begins to "count nine", and every nine days is a "nine". When it comes to "ninety-nine", the weather is warmer, and most parts of the country have entered spring, which is also called "ninety-nine sunny days".

According to the traditional theory of yin and yang and the five elements, the winter solstice is an important solar term for the "transformation of yin and yang", so there is also a saying that "the winter solstice is a yang birth". At the same time, the setting of the intercalary month is also based on the winter solstice.

As the saying goes, "When the winter solstice arrives, eat dumplings". In northern China, there is a custom of eating dumplings on the winter solstice, and in the south, most of them refer to eating glutinous rice balls, of course, there are exceptions, such as in Tengzhou, Shandong and other places, it is popular to drink mutton soup on the day of the winter solstice, which means to drive away the cold.

In addition, in the water town of the south of the Yangtze River, the whole family gathers on the night of the winter solstice to eat red beans and glutinous rice. According to legend, one of the sons of the Gonggong clan did a lot of evil and died on the winter solstice, and after his death, he became a plague ghost and killed the people. But the plague ghosts are particularly afraid of red beans, so people cook and eat red bean rice on the winter solstice, hoping to prevent disasters and get rid of diseases.

Interestingly, Suzhou also has the custom of drinking "winter wine". Dongjiu is a kind of rice wine that is brewed with the addition of osmanthus. On the night of the winter solstice, the common people drink delicious winter liquor while tasting various braised vegetables such as braised beef, and the house is full of laughter.

After the "number nine" began, it was popular among the people to fill in the ninety-nine cold map for recreation. The ninety-nine cold picture is usually a double hook red calligraphy, from the winter solstice to fill in a stroke every day according to the order of strokes, to the ninety-nine after the spring back to the earth, a nine-nine cold picture is completed.

Winter is the season of winter hiding, the north wind is howling, and the earth is frozen. Folklore expert Xiao Fang mentioned in "The Twenty-four Solar Terms and Folk Customs" that the winter solstice is an important seasonal node, and people hold a series of seasonal rituals around the winter solstice.