The East Asian year was not merely time flowing past, but was finely embroidered with festivals set at each turn of season — what is called seasonal customs. Each festival held its own fond practices to bless, to ward off ill energy, and to pray for a good harvest and health. Shall we tour their grain slowly, following the year?
The year opens at Lunar New Year. People offer rites to ancestors, bow to their elders and exchange blessing words, praying for the new year’s fortune. A fortnight later, at the first full moon, greeting the year’s first round moon, people cracked nuts to wish for a year of health, and burned moon-bonfires or gazed at the moon to make a wish. In early summer, at the midsummer festival, they washed their hair in water boiled with sweet flag to cleanse away impurity, and lifted their spirits with swings and wrestling. In autumn, at the harvest-moon festival, they gave thanks for the harvest with rites of new grain, and under the round full moon shared rice cakes, praying for abundance. And at the year’s end, at the winter solstice, they cooked red-bean porridge, driving off ill energy with its red colour and greeting the lengthening sun.
Look quietly at these festivals and one grain runs through them. At each knot of time in the farming rhythm — the seed and the first full moon, the lushness of midsummer, the autumn harvest, the longest night — people layered food, family and small rituals to pray for health, abundance and protection. Seasonal customs, in effect, made a place within the passing year for the human heart and its wishes to settle.
There is something to state honestly here. These customs do not mechanically make a year go well. The red of the porridge does not literally chase away spirits. Their true gift lies in the “togetherness, gratitude and seasonal rhythm” the festivals create. The warm bowl shared by a family gathered round on the longest night — that warmth, surely, is real. It is also worth remembering as a cultural heritage that several countries of East Asia have shared, alike yet differently.
Seen that way, seasonal customs are close to the fond way the old people danced along with the year’s every bend. The heart that paused at each knot of season to pray for blessing and care for one another still gives a quiet echo to our busy today. As always in FortuneLeaf, this is offered not as a fixed fate but as one small pleasure of savouring the grain of the seasons together.