Today is the twenty-third day of the twelfth lunar month, the day known in northern China as Little New Year. In the old rhythm of life, this was the moment when the Spring Festival truly began. Laba, the eighth day of the same lunar month, was more like a prelude; after Little New Year, the New Year was no longer something in the distance.
When I was a child, nearly every rural household raised a pig. People usually kept it until the twenty-third day of the twelfth lunar month before slaughtering it. The pig’s head would be offered to the Kitchen God. Families that did not slaughter a pig often went to those who did and asked for a few blood-stained bristles, then used the pig’s blood to paste them on both sides of the Kitchen God’s image. The ritual was simple but solemn: invite the Kitchen God, make the offering, burn incense, set off firecrackers, light the lamp that would stay burning. With that, the Spring Festival had officially arrived.
There is an old saying: “Report good deeds to Heaven, bring peace to the world below.” Whether the Kitchen God truly protected anyone is something different people may feel differently about. But to the child I once was, the Kitchen God really did seem to bring safety and blessing. Life was visibly improving year after year. More importantly, I could benefit from his annual visit: pork, which was rarely available in ordinary days, could suddenly be eaten freely. We ate it until we were sick of it, until the meat began to lose its freshness. After that, there might still be salted pork to eat for several more months.
Even now, I still do not fully understand why rural families once chose to slaughter pigs almost all at the same time before the Spring Festival, then spend that one month eating pork to the point of revulsion. Whether physically or psychologically, the effect was not necessarily positive. Why could people not stagger the slaughtering throughout the year and eat meat more evenly? The only practical explanation may be that the period before the Spring Festival was the coldest time of the year, making pork easier to store. But that still does not explain why everyone had to do it together. Was it really only because the pig’s head was needed for the Kitchen God?
As the years passed, life became more comfortable. There were more chances to eat meat on ordinary days, and refrigerators entered common households. Fewer and fewer people slaughtered pigs for the New Year. I myself have not spent the Spring Festival in the countryside for about twenty years, so I do not know whether people still invite the Kitchen God now. My guess is that they mostly do not. Even ancestral rites have been simplified, New Year greetings have gone digital, and the old custom of an entire clan gathering around the fire to talk through the night and keep vigil has long disappeared. Compared with all that, in an age of nutritional excess, the Kitchen God must seem even less necessary.
Without the Kitchen God, Little New Year disappears in all but name. Without Little New Year, the Spring Festival no longer has a clear beginning. The sense of ceremony that once announced the holiday is fading away. Under the pandemic, this year’s Spring Festival has also been defined as a “stay-where-you-are New Year.” If people cannot return home for reunion, then shared habits of inheritance lose their setting. I imagine this year’s Spring Festival may become even more ordinary: listening to important speeches, watching the Spring Festival Gala, going online, scrolling short videos, playing games.
By Little New Year, I still felt nothing of the Spring Festival’s approach. I even began to feel irritated in advance by the phone calls and text messages of holiday greetings. Perhaps the quiet habits formed during pandemic isolation have made me reject noise and bustle. Perhaps the pandemic, by forcing people to face certain essentials, has drained my interest in polite, ceremonial greetings. Perhaps a year of reduced contact has widened the psychological distance between me and relatives and friends. Or perhaps it is simply the middle-aged unease of being one year older.
Little New Year has become a date on the calendar. Without looking at the calendar, it would be easy to forget it altogether. The original meaning of the Spring Festival lay in reunion; if reunion is no longer possible, then perhaps its meaning is reduced to a long holiday. No Kitchen God, no ritual, no gathering—Spring Festival is becoming more and more like ordinary life. A custom passed down for three thousand years has managed to fade away in only thirty, and this happened without any legal force suppressing it. So-called tradition and culture, it turns out, can be very fragile.
If culture is so fragile, what about thought? “Ruan Ming sold his thoughts for money; Xiangzi accepted thoughts for money.” If the price is right, thought is fragile too. And the soul? In the West, people often speak of selling one’s soul to Satan. Fortunately, we have no Satan.
When everything has a price, it means everything can be bought and sold. And what can be bought and sold is not so deeply cherished. After losing the sacred places where the spirit once rested, we become more material, and more empty.
People treasure most what they lack. For me as a child, the greatest meaning of the New Year was eating meat. Now, the greatest meaning of the New Year is the inheritance of tradition and the revisiting of affection. Yet both seem to be moving farther away.
People also fear most what they care about most. It is perhaps like the old feeling of becoming timid as one nears home. Deep down, I want to recover every memory of the Spring Festivals of my childhood. And so the closer the holiday comes, the more hesitant I become; the nearer it draws, the more restless I feel.