The Chinese ghost festival is in the 7th month of the Chinese lunar calendar. Chinese tends to restrict / delay / cancel their activities within this month, and warn their friends and relatives to go home earlier in order not to come across some wondering spirits. For many, ghost festivals reminiscent of various scary experiences or memory that we have since young. However, I remember vividly that I do enjoy this festivals as a kid because it has lots of funs.The origin of Chinese ghost festivals originated from Buddhism. Buddha taught one of his disciples to hold a grand ceremony to provide offerings to various monks in order to save his late mother who is suffering in the hell as a hungry ghost. As Buddhism is widely accepted in China and the festivals advocates the spread of filial piety and dissemination of kindness, which can be well assimilated with the Confucian teaching. It soon becomes one of the many festivals Chinese celebrates yearly. Malaysian, Singaporean and Taiwanese have preserved this culture intact.
Do you know we spent more than RM100, 000,000 just to celebrate the Chinese ghost festival in Malaysia? Yes, we spent that much of money. Who said our economy is down?
Now, talk about the fun things when we were kids.
1) Every 15th day of the 7th month of the lunar calendar, my farther will bring home a huge banana stem. He will then chop into several pieces. After lighting the candles, we will stick the candles into the banana stem so that the candles can stand. What is fun for me is to surround my house and my farther’s shop with all these candles, it looks nice for me. Till now, still not really sure what is the rationale behind that.
2) There will be more than one worshipping, within my house, within the area where our family does business, in the temples that we visited and some other Chinese association that my parents join. Lots of foods and necessity needs to be prepared to be offered during these worshipping for those spirits. As a kid, I only know my parents will bring home lots of foods for me to eat after every single worshipping. I still remember we have altogether 4 worships.
3) Getai (歌台) performance and movie – Not so popular nowadays because it is quite costly to stage a performance. We all know that these kinds of performance are for those spirits, but who cares. We are just too excited to watch it with our cousin and siblings after our dinner. Whenever there is a getai performance, I always want to sneak into the back stage to see what those actors / actress are doing back there.
4) The festivals is often quite lively, most of the time we need to have a road block in order to have such celebration. You will see heaps of necessity (sugar, rice, flour, canned foods/drinks, etc) and other foods offerings piling up everywhere on the table, the huge 5 colour dragon incense, 5 colour flags sticking on the foods offering, various type of paper money and paper gold, papers car, paper ship, paper aeroplane. You name it, they have it. As kids, we are thrilled to see all these; we always steal those 5 colour flags to fight among each others. At the end of the festivals, we also need to help burning those papers made items. You may say I am crazy, but what I remembered is I quite like doing that with other kids.
But time has changed; we have all grown up and are so busy with our own career. Would our next generation have such fun as well?
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