Men should marry when they are young, and women should marry when they are young. This has been an unchanging principle since ancient times. Although it is now advocated to change customs and engage in new weddings, pared to the 1960s and 1970s, it has bee more luxurious and the simple customs of people no longer exist. I am from Zhuzhou, Hunan. Let me talk about the wedding customs in Zhuzhou.
isiting and Engaging
Matchmaker es to propose marriage
When men and women reach the age of marriage, their parents first find a matchmaker. When the matchmaker discovers that there is someone of appropriate age in the family, they first municate with their parents and then schedule a date to arrange a blind date location, usually a market place. On the day of the market, both the man and the woman go to the designated location, take a look at each other, say a few words, and show their cheerful personality on the spot. Generally, they will return home and talk to the matchmaker. After agreeing, the man will choose a date for engagement (we call it Dingshi there). There is also a type that is favored by oneself or by parents, such as cousins. If they are related, parents will entrust an acquaintance to act as a matchmaker. In the 1960s and 1970s, many cousins got married in rural areas, and the third representative of siblings getting married was more. This is called "new relatives getting married with old relatives", which is even more joyful, but this kind of close relatives getting married is still not good.
The engagement requires four kinds of gifts, that is, a few pieces of cloth. Decent families will use dacron and dacron fabrics, nylon socks, and those with poor economic conditions will use khaki cloth and cotton socks. In this way, even if the engagement is successful, the man can go to the woman's home and send some gifts to the woman's home for the New Year holiday. Generally, the four kinds of gifts are the same, namely, the Beginning of Summer Festival, the Dragon Boat Festival, the Mid-Autumn Festival and the Spring Festival. Meat, eggs, noodles And a piece of fabric, after a year or two, when both parties have no objections, the woman tells the matchmaker that they can cut the shoe sample (that is, the man tells the woman the size of the shoes worn by his family). The man gives the woman some money for cutting the sample, which was only a few tens of yuan at that time. The woman needs to make a pair of shoes for each member of the man's family and match them with hand-embroidered insoles.