Wedding customs recorded in Wang Jiru’s paper-cutting
Wedding customs are the most important part of folk life. Getting married in daily life is a very important event in everyones life, especially in rural areas. A series of etiquette and customs before and during marriage are It is quite complex and rich, mainly including marriage proposal, engagement, marriage and post-marriage. Marriage negotiation is mainly the initial stage of discussing the marriage between a man and a woman. Generally, the man asks a matchmaker to go to the womans home to propose marriage, which includes several procedures such as "proposal", "offering", and "blind date".
If this stage goes well, the engagement stage will begin, in which the man will solemnly send betrothal gifts to the womans home and also host a banquet to entertain relatives and friends. After the engagement, the parents of the man and woman and the matchmaker begin to select a wedding day. At this time, the man gives financial gifts to the woman, which is called a big gift. The woman’s family is also busy sewing quilts and collecting insoles for their daughter. The day before the wedding, the woman will send her daughters dowry to the grooms house. On the eve of the wedding, the brides family must give their daughter a "high ranking" and "favor". "Shangtou" means to change the hair style and put the braids into a bun; "opening the face" is also called "opening the face", which is actually to give the bride a beauty treatment and to express the end of girlhood. At the agreed time, the man begins to marry the bride, and the wedding procession starts from front to back, including the gunner, the local music club, the groom and the bride (in the old days, they took a sedan chair, later on a horse, and now they mostly take a car, etc.).
After the bride is brought into the house, she then "worships heaven and earth" and then enters the bridal chamber. On the first day after the wedding, the newlyweds have to go to the brides house and stay there for nine days before going back. The above is the process of local marriage customs. However, with the development of society, peoples pace of life has gradually accelerated, and the infiltration of foreign culture has gradually changed peoples thinking, making the marriage customs passed down from generation to generation regarded as cumbersome by more young people and no longer follow the rules as before. This has led to the younger generation forgetting ancient marriage customs. Wang Jiru saw this and changed every aspect of marriage customsThis process is conveyed to future generations in the form of paper-cutting, and it also provides excellent image data for researchers of folk culture.
