Chinese New Year Festivities
Tue February 20th, 2007 • Responses (1) •
Today is the third day of the Chinese New Year. Most people are still on holidays enjoying themselves with family feast, delicious food, visiting relatives and friends, going to art performances, and firing fireworks and firecrackers. Spring Festival, known to the West more as the Chinese New Year and comparable to the Christmas holidays in the West, is the most important celebration for Chinese people every year.
There are various kinds of festivities during the Spring Festival period. Although the official holiday is usually about a week starting from the first day of the lunar New Year, the preparation and celebrations for the New Year actually starts from the last month of the previous year, as early as on the 8th day of the 12th lunar month when many families enjoy “laba porridge” (腊八粥) made with glutinous rice, millet, seeds of Job’s tears, jujube berries, lotus seeds, beans, longan and gingko, and will not end until the day of the Lantern Festival on the 15th of the first lunar month.
Spring Festival Couplets
As a tradition, before the New Year comes, every people would completely clean the indoors and outdoors and beautify their homes with traditional ornaments. In many places particularly in the countryside, people would decorate all their door panels with Spring Festival couplets, putting down the best wishes for good luck, bright future, happiness and wealth, bright future for the New Year. The Spring Festival couplets are usually done with Chinese calligraphy with black or golden characters on red paper.
Reversed “Fu”
Among all the decorations, the Chinese character “fu” (福) is a must. This character, meaning blessing and happiness, would usually be pasted upside down. In Chinese, the “reversed fu” is homophonic with “fu comes” or “fu arrives”, both pronounced as “fu-dao-le” (福到了).
New Year’s Eve Family Feast
People attach great importance to Spring Festival Eve. All family members will be together, and have dinner together. Typically, this meal is more luxurious than usual. And the menu is a set of meaningful dishes, such as fish – “yu” (鱼), which is homophonic with ‘abundance’, would be a ‘must-have’. Others dishes like chicken and bean curd, pronounced respectively “ji” (鸡), and “doufu,” (豆腐), meaning auspiciousness (吉) and richness (富), will also be dishes for that dinner.
§ Read the rest of this entry »»»
