The Most Unforgettable Dragon Boat Festival

This holiday has been the most interesting one this year. I’m so happy that we followed my hometown customs to celebrate the Dragon Boat festival together with my classmates.
When it comes to dragon boat festival, Chinese people will think about zongzi. However, I want to share something different with you: eggs and five-color thread. In my hometown, we have many activities in Dragon Boat Festival. Firstly, we would prepare red-dyed eggs as a symbol of good fortune and protection. Second, we will also use five-color threads to make some handicrafts, which are bags for holding red-dyed eggs and bracelets.
I pre-ordered egg-dyeing pigments and five-color threads of varying thicknesses online in advance.
My three classmates and I celebrated the Dragon Boat Festival in the dormitory with these materials. At the beginning, we wore five-color thread bracelets for each other. According to my grandmother, we need to wear it for seven days.
Then we started making bags for holding red-dyed eggs. To be honest, this is an activity for children in my hometown—when the Dragon Boat Festival comes, kids make these bags themselves with adults’ help. I thought the bag-making process was the noisiest and most complicated part of our activity. We gathered around my desk and set our phones to record this fantastic moment. Beautiful music filled the room as the five-color threads wound around our fingertips. At the same time, we talked and laughed. Whenever our handicrafts took on a slightly different shape, we’d show them off to the three smartphones filming us. In that moment, we put everything else aside and simply immersed ourselves in communicating and crafting. For a few hours, I was kid again, connected to hometown traditions through every twist of the thread.
The final activity was dyeing eggs red. In my hometown, we traditionally boil eggs with a specific plant to make them red, so we rarely use pigments. What impressed us most was how potent the pigments were—we only needed to sprinkle a little pigment, add some water, and the entire egg would turn red instantly.

Every festival is celebrated through different traditions, and what makes it meaningful is the human connection. Diverse customs from various regions make festivals become colorful.