Double Ghost Month is Upon Us

Workers at a clothing store in Fengyuan burn ghost money.

It's a double helping of ghost month this year, and today everyone was out setting up tables of offerings to the ghosts, and burning incense and ghost money, including our family.

Ghosts are just like real people; they like looking at sweets, but they usually don't eat much of them.

Apparently the ghosts have to have something from both husband and wife in married families....

"Can you make some dal?" My wife asks me.
"Dal? Sure. Why? Don't we have enough for tonight?"
"Well," she replied. "I want it for the bai-bai. Today we have to bai-bai, and you have to cook food for the ghosts." Now that was an interesting cross-cultural moment, when the Taiwanese wife asks the American skeptic husband to make Indian lentil soup for Chinese ghosts.....I sure hope Chinese ghosts like cumin seed.....

Everyone was appeasing the ghosts today. Convenience stores....

...betel nut girls....

...and ordinary shopkeepers.

UPDATE: No, food had to be cooked for three or four different supernatural entities that day, ancestors, ghosts, a very low ranking god....very confusing.
[Taiwan] [Ghost Month]