Signs are Pointing Toward a Propitious New Year

The New Year festivities keep marching along.  The last several days have been filled with the sounds and smells that go along with fire crackers and bonfires.  Shops that had been closed for the New Year holiday are now ready to reopen. Before reopening they display an altar with their god, fruits, flowers and incense.  They also provide burners for employees to burn paper money to send on to their deceased  relatives. However, the shop doesn't officially reopen until they set off firecrackers.  The air is filled with the sounds and scents of the New Year.

Early days in the New Year I noticed that several temples had buckets filled with rice and symbolic items on display.

These two photos are of the first two displays that I saw in small local temples.  Each bucket is filled with rice, a mirror, a sword, a ruler, a scale, a pair of scissors, and perhaps a dagger.  I don't think the buckets on the left were complete, because later I found the display on the right which has a banner, and an electric light.  Chia informed me that these are all part of a Taoist ritual.  In my imagination I pictured people marching along and chanting while holding the buckets.

Yesterday, when we walked by the small temple with the red bannered buckets, all the lights were ablaze.

The buckets are on the right and left of this display to the gods.  The women at the temple explained that everything here is in honor of the New Year and the god Tu Di Gong.  They encouraged us to come back at 2 p.m. for the chanting, but we never made it.

Today, however, as David, Taylor and I walked past the Citibank ATM from our first day in Taipei, we heard chanting in that very first temple we visited.

The courtyard leading in to the temple had this huge display of electrically lit rice buckets. There was no marching as I had imagined, but there was chanting.

This small altar is in the center of the rice buckets.  Looking closely we could see food products - rice, tea, apples, cakes, many fruits.  All provided to us on earth by the god Tu Di Gong - the god of the earth.

We walked through this colorful display, through the clouds of incense and into the main chamber where the chanting, accompanied by drumbeats filled the air.

I encourage you to listen to the following videos.  Each one is slightly different.  One is a very measured atonal chant, the other breaks into a more glorious sound with several instruments and differently pitched voices.

We aren't done with this temple yet.  When we left, we walked down the regular sidewalk next to the temple and discovered that the area had been made into a kitchen.

This area is normally a sidewalk next to the temple.  Today it is a kitchen and they plan to serve a lot of people.  We walked by stacks of  ham hocks and fresh vegetables.

These women are washing the dishes.  Have they already served a meal today?

The sidewalk that has been transformed into a kitchen is on the left. The passage on the right is the regular hallway leading into one side of the temple.

And this all happened on the way to the park.  I think it was a highlight of this visit to Taiwan for me.

On the way back from the park we walked by the temple again.  Food prep was still happening, but oh my...........................................a troop of volunteers was dismantling the fabulous display of rice buckets.

Can you see the people dismantling the display?

It looks like everything will be stored until next year.

We still have a few more days of the New Year celebration left.  I wonder what will be in store?  I certainly feel that what we saw today is a symbol that we will have a most propitious New Year.  What are the chances that we would stumble into the final chanting of the celebration, and that within two hours all would be disassembled?  It was all very fortunate in my mind.