the Dolls Festival

March 3 rd is the day of "the Doll's Festival", celebrating and praying for health and happiness of girls, especially daughters in a certain family.  If the family doesn't have any daughter, it doesn't celebrate that day; actually my parents never celebrated that day, because I have only an elder brother.

In Japanese, phonetically, it is pronounced as "hinah matz lee", meaning baby-bird festival.

The history of the Doll's Festival is unclear, it had begun at 1000 years ago, but it had got popular about 300 years ago.
Usually, people decorate dolls as seen below, and take special food (rice based cakes and snacks) and drink white rice wine.

In picture below, in my house we have only two dolls; male and female, it is very simple and there are only two which maybe a prince and a princess.
I think this type of decoration was made in the early beginning of  this festival, and it simply imitated the situation in which very young couples got married just like kids playing.

However, the picture in the left shows full set of dolls in the place where my mother is now staying at.  They look like gorgeous as if it was when festival got popular 300 years ago.

From this picture, we may learn how the ancient aristocracy was and what celebrities would have been as represented by the dolls.
In addition to those observations,  the families were hoping to a young bride and groom that a good marriage would bring happiness and their prosperity of a large family with many subordinates.

All dolls are made by tiny clothes precisely manufactured and hand crafted which shows the quality of Japanese technology even in ancient ages as well.