A Chinese Ghost Festival

I think we chinese are like festival freaks ... we celebrating all kinda events and when we ran outta spesel events we pulled ghost into the pikture and then create a celebration outta it! Maybe soon we will have this Chinese dusk Festival! where we will celebrates the pure existance of dust itself!

Bek to the Hungry Ghost Festival, anyway ... i do agreed with Linpeh with his post entitled "Hungry Ghost My Foot!" Who da fark goan translated it to Hungry Ghost Festival anyway??!!! I never heard my mum call it lidat in canto before! All along shes has been using 7 Yuet 14 (means 14th days of the 7th month) only!

I been having my fair share of this Ghost festival for as long as i can remember, prolly as young as 5-6 years old. Preparation starts a few days before the actual date and the whole family would sit down after dinner and start their annual origami plektis. Everyone were required to help in folding the paper offering into the shape of a "yuen bou" (gold nugget) to be burn on the day of the festival.


The morning of the festival itself we would go to pasak and buy lotss stuffs for the prayers, this is also one of the few days in a year we would get to eat chicken (yar hard to belif but chicken used to be a luxury way back then and we dont really get to eat them as often as today) other than chicken we would also buy Siew Yoke, Tofu, Biscuit with colorful icing sugar on top, peanuts, candy, jossticks, candles and lotsa other stuffs all to be used in the prayers in that night itself.

By 5pm we would bring our cangkul to the llongkang in front of our house and start losening the soils around the longkang, this is to enable us to plant the josstick and candles easier into the soil later on tonite.


Right after dinner everyone would start bringing all the praying stuffs out, there is a belief that whatever you brought out for this ritual you CANT take it back to your house later on and so everyone make sure that we do not bring anything extras or else we would just hafta leave it by the side of the road till someone pick it up.

This went on for as long as i remembered ... but last year it was a lil bit different, last year I took some pictures and I think i took more than pictures .... i think there is something "additional" innit ....

See for urself, u be the judge ....


This year i dont think i wanna take any piikture anymore .... like the way Lil Devil say it ... "Kheng Kheng" ledi!


Happy Chinese Ghost Festival Everibodi!
.