Hina Arare (bite-sized sweet rice crackers)

Bite-sized pretty appearance with modest colors and crispy texture. Arare are one of the traditional sweet snacks for the Doll’s Festival in Japan.

They come in several pale colors. When they come in three, the colors represent the symbols heralding the arrival of spring. Pink is Japanese plum blossoms, green is , and white is remaining snow.

They often have four pale colors. In this case, they symbolize the four seasons. Pink is spring, green is summer, yellow is autumn, and white is winter.

If they come in more than four colors as in the photo, maybe you can have your own ideas.

The Doll’s Festival is the 3rd of March. It’s the day to pray for the health and happiness of young girls. Many families with girls display the dolls called “Hina Ningyo”.

The full set of the Dolls is gorgeous, and has many members. But they are expensive, and take a huge space in the Japanese houses these days.

So, families to follow the old-fashioned tradition is getting less and less. Even so, you can still find many mini Dolls as shown in the background of the photo here and there.

The couple of the mini version represents the Emperor, and Empress in the 8-12 century (Heian era). The dolls are dressed in imperial court costumes. They are not accompanied by their servants as in the original form.

But, people believe that the Dolls magic is still there. That is, to take away the bad luck of the girls. The Dolls are believed to absorb the misfortunes and diseases of the girls.

The parents put away the Dolls as soon as the Festival is over. Because otherwise, they believe the girls can’t marry until much later.

There are several other snacks associated with the Festival. I’ll show some more of them in the coming days.

You can read the related post:
Sakura Mochi (Japanese cherry blossom sticky rice cake)

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Thank you!
Toshi

Japanese sweets series 007:

Hina Arare on Syosaku Urushi Glass Charger Plate-L Vermilion with Gold Leaf, Dishwasher Safe.

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