Laba congee

Laba congee

　　In the olden days, there was a family of four: an elderly couple and their two sons. The old couple were very hardworking, toiling in the fields all year round. They planted in spring, weeded in summer, and harvested in autumn, diligently making a living. The household stored all kinds of grains—large bins full, small bins overflowing. There was also a large date tree in their yard, which the old couple tended carefully. The dates it bore were crisp and sweet. When taken to market, they fetched a good amount of silver, allowing the family to live a fairly prosperous life.

    The old couple worked hard just to save enough to marry off their two sons.

    As the sons grew older and reached marriageable age, the old couple themselves grew very old. On his deathbed, the father urged his two sons to work the land diligently; on her deathbed, the mother urged them to take good care of the date tree in the yard, to save money and store grain for their future weddings.

    Now the family of four was down to just the two brothers. The elder brother, seeing the granaries full to the brim, said to the younger one, “We have so much grain—we have more than enough. Let’s take this year off!”

    The younger brother replied, “This year, the date tree doesn’t matter either. We’ve got plenty of dates to eat anyway.”

    And so, the two brothers grew lazier and more gluttonous by the day. All they did was eat, drink, and enjoy themselves year after year. In just a few years, they had eaten up all the grain, and the dates from the tree in the yard became worse and worse each year.

    By the eighth day of the twelfth lunar month that year, there was really nothing left to eat in the house. What could they do? The elder brother found a small broom, the younger one a small winnowing basket, and they began to sweep out the bottom of the large grain bins and the crevices of the small ones. From here they scooped up a handful of millet, from there a handful of red beans. In this way, they gathered a little bit of various grains and cereals—not a lot of quantity, but quite a variety. Finally, they found a few dried red dates as well, which they put into a pot and boiled together. When the porridge was ready, the two brothers ate the hodgepodge of grains and looked at each other, only then remembering the words their parents had spoken before they died. They were filled with deep regret.

    Having tasted the bitterness of laziness, the two brothers turned over a new leaf. The next year, they both became diligent, just like their parents, and before long, they were living well again, married with children.

    To remember the lesson of laziness and to remind people never to forget the virtues of diligence and thrift, from that time on, every year on the eighth day of the twelfth lunar month, people would eat congee made from a mixture of grains and cereals. Because this day is the eighth day of the twelfth lunar month, it came to be called “Laba congee.”