It's New Year. From New Year's Eve until the fifth day of the first lunar month, no household likes to scold children. This period will be their wanton good days and the happy times they look forward to all year.
After eating and drinking their fill, the children run outside in groups of threes and fives with little firecrackers they have just opened to play and frolic. The winter night is biting with heavy snow flying around, but it doesn't stop the children's natural love for playing and noise.
Before it gets late, the Old Captain lets each family take a bowl of dumplings home, but for some families without a pot, how they will heat them up, he didn't say, nor did anyone bring it up.
Only later did Zhou Jiao learn that these dumplings from each house had been offered to each family's ancestors, of course, each person taking their own home. Otherwise, who would eat the food in others' ancestral offering?
