Chapter Twenty-Nine. Festivals And Celebrations

Abstract

Most of the annual Kam festivals and celebrations in Xiangye had long since disappeared. Those remaining in the 1930s and 1940s included Eating Sweet Glutinous Rice Cakes, Eating New Rice, Eating Bianmi, Mid-Autumn Festival and Kam New Year. The Sweeping the Graves Festival was originally a Han festival borrowed by the Kam people. Most villagers observed the Mid-Autumn Festival on the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month. On that day, the moon was at its biggest and brightest, dark clouds never seemed to block it out, and it never seemed to rain. By the time of the Mid-Autumn Festival, rice, cotton, beans and gourds had all been harvested and stored in barns. Young men and children took advantage of the bright moonshine to form into groups and conspire to 'steal' what remained of the beans and gourds in the fields, whatever had not yet been harvested. Keywords: beans; celebrations; cotton; gourds; Kam people; Mid-Autumn Festival; rice; Xiangye