Crowds gather to watch the traditional beigun intangible cultural heritage performance in Shanxi during the holiday. The performance features a child in costume bound to the top end of an iron rod. The lower end of the rod is secured to a man's back. As the man walks, he moves to the beat of drums, and the child sways and acts out theatrical stories, creating a visual spectacle. [Photo by Li Zhaomin/For China Daily]

Varied celebrations

Spending several days in Shanxi during Spring Festival can give people an immersive experience of the variety of traditions, cultural elements and values associated with the holiday, according to locals and visitors alike.

In Shanxi, as well as other regions of the country, the Spring Festival celebrations last for more than a month.

The celebrations start on Laba Festival, which is the eighth day of the 12th month on the lunar calendar, which fell on Jan 7 this year.

For more than 2,000 years, Laba Festival has been an occasion to worship ancestors and the gods and to pray for a good harvest and good fortune. The tradition involves a number of practices like making laba garlic.

The making of laba garlic is simple — garlic cloves are pickled in jars of vinegar. The cloves usually turn green before Chinese New Year's Eve, ready to be served along with the famed jiaozi dumplings for family reunion dinners.

Simple as it is, making tasty laba garlic is dependent on high-quality vinegar. Fortunately, Shanxi is the place where the country's best matured vinegar is produced.

On the morning of Jan 7, people lined up in front of an outlet of a time-honored vinegar business in Taiyuan, the provincial capital.

They used various containers to collect vinegar from a huge jar at the outlet. The sour-sweet fragrance of matured vinegar permeated the air and could be smelt hundreds of meters away.

"That's the smell we Shanxi people love in particular," said a Taiyuan resident surnamed Wang. "That's the smell of New Year we have been so familiar with since childhood."

After that day, the festive atmosphere prevails throughout the province, which is demonstrated in practices such as decorating homes, streets and communities with Spring Festival couplets, lanterns and other auspicious ornaments; preparing local dishes such as flowery buns; and varieties of folk activities such as stilt walking, molten iron firework shows and performances of local operas.