Yesterday afternoon we went to the downtown of the city to buy a lantern for my daughter. The street was crowded with people and all sorts of lanterns on sale. Since I have not done such lantern hunting for many years, I was surprised to see that lanterns have changed so much in comparison with what lanterns should look like in my memory. They are all made of plastic and plated metal with sophisticated shape and color. What amazes me is that they are all electrical by battery. My daughter picked up a dragon lantern. It is a red plastic translucent ball with four golden dragons attached on four sides decorated with many hanging articles. It has a bulb inside to glitter and can spin and sound music. As far as a lantern is concerned, it is definitely a high-tech product. My daughter loves it very much. But somehow I just do not feel it right to have this kind of lantern for the Lantern Festival. When I said it to my wife, she laughed at me saying I am old-fashioned. I do not know whether I am out of date, but it does set me thinking. In the evening, my wife took my daughter to the street. But they just saw a very few children play lanterns. Maybe that is partly because of the weather—it was drizzling. But I am sure the main reason is that people do not care about it as much as they used to.
Gone are old good days when I was a little boy and celebrated the Lantern Festival. The thing I enjoyed most was to watch my father make a rabbit lantern for me. At that time, the lantern was made of bamboo frame with paper cover glued on it. My father first cut many slices of bamboo sticks then tied the stickers together in the shape of a rabbit. After that he glued white paper onto the frame. The two eyes of the rabbit were either painted or stuck with another layer of small round red paper. The trick and most difficult part was to make a tail. The colorful paper was cut into stings and glued to the tail frame. It flew beautifully in the wind! In the evening of the festival, the small lane where we used to live was filled with all sorts of paper rabbit lanterns, some are wheeled and some hand carried, some small as tiny baby and some giant to “ all my God size “, but all lit with candle. It was virtually a sea of lanterns. In the dark night, you could not distinguish what are stars in the sky and what are lanterns on the ground. Children played so joyfully with their lanterns and parents watched so happily their products on display. Some naughty boys even threw stones onto the rabbit lanterns and set them on fire and set the victims crying to home. They called it—“eat rabbit meat” Of course, this vandalism was stopped by parents. What a nice atmosphere!
Needless to say, our society keeps advancing with the development of science and technology. But the evolution does threaten the preservation of our tradition. I am concerned that when my daughter grows up, she has very little to tell her children about the Lantern Festival from her memory. So I am considering next year I will take her to countryside to experience how people celebrate the festival there. I hope things are not so dramatically changed there.
