The Lantern Festival[132] is assigned to the fifteenth day of the first month. As the Chinese year is strictly determined by lunations, this means of course that the festival occurs at the time of the first full moon of the year. Coloured-paper lanterns are hung at the doors of houses and shops and are also carried in procession. Above the doors of the houses are often hung fir-branches, betokening prosperity and especially longevity.[133] The family eat little round cakes of glutinous rice which, being supposed to represent the full moon,[134] may be called moon-cakes. There is no doubt that in remote times the fifteenth of the first and the fifteenth of the eighth months were devoted to moon-worship. A curious custom observed at the Lantern Festival is called the _tsou pai ping_--"the expulsion of disease." In some localities this merely consists in a procession of villagers across the neighbouring bridges, the procession returning home by a route other than that by which they set out. The popular notion obviously is that sickness is caused by invisible beings of a malignant nature who on the occasion of this festival can be driven across the local streams and so expelled from the village.[135] In other localities the expulsion of disease is on this occasion performed only by women, who do not necessarily cross bridges but simply walk out into the fields and back by a different route. Male villagers perform a similar ceremony on the ninth of the ninth month. [Illustration: FIRST-FULL-MOON STILT-WALKERS (see p. 183).] [Illustration: "WALKING BOATS" AT THE FIRST-FULL-MOON FESTIVAL (see p. 184).]