ABC WEDNESDAY F for Hungry Ghost Festival
Hungry Ghost Festival or the Feast for the Wandering Souls (also known as Zhong Yuan Jie 中元节) is for the Chinese, just as Halloween is for Americans.
7th Month activities include preparing ritualistic food offerings, burning incense, and burning joss stick, paper made items such as clothes, gold and other fine goods for the visiting spirits of the ancestors. Elaborate meals would be served with empty seats for each of the deceased in the family treating the deceased as if they are still living.I never had chance to attend any Halloween celebration yet. But I definitely don’t like so called 7th month ghost festival in Singapore. Started from the first day of 7th month according to Chinese calendar (27 Aug this year 2009), people have started burning their offering. Worse things are they created a lot of rubbish, everywhere are those left over paper money, and the ashes are flying in the air.
This is a Chinese tradition that was hand down over the generations. I do respect other races' traditions and customs. I do respect the religion. I won’t complain how noisy those celebration is still on at 11pm night, all these are bearable since this is one year once celebration. But I really fed up due to their serious pollution to the air environment. They should burn the stuff legally. Not like on the grass or pavement where it makes it all dirty. We do respect to different religion but we must respect to our earth, our nature, our environment first. Don’t we pray for our better life and safety during the 7th month, then why we can’t do a bit more, love our nature, love our environment, love those plants, love those trees, save our earth to give our next next generations a better life. Don’t you know by burning those paper how many trees will die? If there is something so called spiritual things, then I believe every tree have their spirit too, our human will get punishment one day if we don’t start to protect our earth from now. Who cares about ghosts when humans can't even take care of themselves?
Respect and be good to our parents, grand parents when they are alive, give them real money to spend not the paper money when they no longer able to enjoy the life. Try our best to give our next generations the best quality of life, Isn’t it the best respect to those dead people?