Chapter One Introduction to Folklore

Folk customs are popular habits and conventions that the common people of a nation create and practice in their production and life, and pass on from one generation to another. In fact, folk customs are an assembly of various mass cultures which may include proprieties, festivals, civilizations, artisanship, and beliefs in the folks. Folk customs possess features of instructiveness, inheritance, expandability and variability. Generated from social practice, folk customs exhibit a lot of social codes of common manners and behaviors which are then used to guide, normalize, regulate and serve people's productive and living activities, thus satisfy people's needs for a diversified social life.