Qing Ming Easter

Today we did our Qing Ming Easter picnic. Noah and Jonah loved it. It was a great day, we came prepared with cheurng funs and knife and cutting board to chop up the chicken and Fau yuk. We burnt the money for My Mom, Father, and told them to deliver some money to Aunt Anne and Uncle Tommy. It was nice going later then the Qing Ming rush, when it's all crazy with parking and whole clans of people coming in and out with whole pigs. I'm not saying they judge our small family of four with our one chicken and small bone of fau yuk (which we still didn't really finish by the way. I'm just saying it feels that way.
But today there was hardly anyone there, and we had our little picnic blanket which dai dai almost fell asleep on from food coma afterward. The sun was warm. It was nice. I saw at the end that though Noah had been playing with the fire, the offering was not completely burned. This worried me a little bit. Did I have to do it over? But then I figure eventually it will disintegrate and really if anything is important, it's not necessarily the burning but the act of bowing. On fact I think that it is possible that if you did the ritual in your mind alone, or perhaps wrote it out, or did it on line or in some sort of virtual world, it would amount to the same thing. Not because it is only in your head, but because it is literally the Thought that counts. In other words, the magical transfer of money to the spirits is through thought. But by actually doing the ritual, the thought is stronger because you actually do a physical action with physical consequence involving heat, smell, sight, touching of the paper. Well I guess it would have been better if I hadn't seen that the paper wasn't burned through. But I decided to just continue to pour water over it and leave it as is. We packed up and headed home.

This was the most enjoyable Qing Ming yet, and the leftovers were our little Easter Feast. In the afternoon we made our Easter Eggs and I guess tomorrow is Church and an Easter Egg Hunt in the back yard.