What are the customs and traditions of Xiaohan? What is the origin of the Minor Cold solar term?

What are the customs and traditions of Xiaohan? What is the origin of the Minor Cold solar term?
Minor Cold is one of the 24 solar terms, indicating the arrival of winter. So what are the customs and traditions of Minor Cold? What is the origin of the Minor Cold solar term? Let’s take a look at the following content!

What are the customs and traditions of Xiaohan?

Nanjing: Eating rice with vegetables
In ancient times, Nanjing people attached great importance to Minor Cold, but with the changes of the times, its importance has gradually faded, and now people can only find traces of it in their lives.
During the Minor Cold, people in Nanjing usually cook vegetable rice. The contents of the vegetable rice are different. Some people cook it with dwarf yellow vegetables, bacon slices, sausage slices or diced pressed duck, and then add some chopped ginger and glutinous rice. It is very fragrant and delicious. Among them, short-legged yellow rice, sausages and pressed duck are all famous specialties of Nanjing. They can be said to be the real "Nanjing vegetable rice" and can even be compared with Laba porridge. The Lesser Cold season is also the busiest time for traditional Chinese medicine practitioners and Chinese medicine pharmacies. Generally, all the paste prescriptions prepared at the beginning of winter are almost used up. At this time, some families will cook a little more and eat it around the Spring Festival. Residents' daily diet also tends to focus on sexual foods, such as mutton and dog meat, among which mutton soup is the most common. Some restaurants also offer angelica and ginger mutton soup. In recent years, some traditional winter mutton dishes have reappeared on the table, recreating Nanjing's cold winter food customs.
As the saying goes, "The Lesser Cold and the Greater Cold are so cold that things turn into ice." Nanjing people have their own set of physical exercises with regional characteristics during the Lesser Cold season, such as skipping rope, kicking shuttlecock, rolling iron rings, squeezing oil residue (pushing each other against the wall), cockfighting (crossing one leg and standing on the other, fighting each other), etc. If it snows, people will cheer and jump for joy, have snowball fights, and build snowmen. Soon their whole body will be warm and their blood circulation will flow smoothly.
Guangdong: Eating glutinous rice
It is a Guangzhou tradition to eat glutinous rice in the morning of Xiaohan. To avoid it being too sticky, the rice is usually 60% glutinous rice and 40% fragrant rice. Chop the bacon and Chinese sausage, fry the peanuts, add some chopped scallions, and mix it with the rice.

What is the origin of the Minor Cold solar term?

Every year between January 5 and January 7 of the Gregorian calendar, the sun reaches 285 degrees of ecliptic longitude, which is the Minor Cold solar term. "Collected Explanations of the 72 Seasonal Changes" states: "In the twelfth month, the cold is still light at the beginning of the month, hence the name. It will be severe in the middle of the month." Because the coldest days of winter are a few days after the Minor Cold, and because the Minor Cold corresponds to the Lesser Heat of summer, it is named "Minor" and "Cold".
Minor Cold, like Major Cold, Minor Heat, Major Heat and End of Heat, is a solar term that indicates the changes in temperature. That is to say, in the Yellow River Basin, Major Cold is colder than Minor Cold at that time. And because Minor Cold is in the last few days of "Erjiu", it enters "Sanjiu" a few days after Minor Cold, and the Minor Cold in winter corresponds to the Minor Heat in summer, so it is called Minor Cold. The Great Cold, which comes after the Lesser Cold, is also very cold during the "four nine days of cold" when "sleeping at night is like sleeping outside", and the Great Cold in winter corresponds to the Great Heat in summer, so it is called the Great Cold.

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