The most important festival in China is the New Year or Spring festival. The Chinese have a special calendar used to mark holidays, so their New Year’s Day varies every year. It started this year on January 28 and the celebrations will carry on for two weeks until the Lantern Festival on February11.
The Chinese years are represented by symbolic animals – this year is the Year of the Rooster. The festival celebrates the end of winter, and the coming of spring, as the days are beginning to get longer. Before the festival, everyone cleans and decorates their homes. Red is the most popular colour for decorating as it represents good luck. Wooden frames in the home are sometimes painted red, and paper cut-outs and banners with short poems are used for decoration. Flowers are a popular decoration too, for example, sprigs of cherry blossom, which is one of the first trees to flower in spring.
The Spring Festival is a very important family occasion, and people will travel great distances to meet up with their families. The festival commences on the eve of the New Year with a great family feast. After the meal, families will often go to the temple to pray, burn incense and pay tribute to their ancestors. Dumplings are traditionally served at midnight in North China; whereas in the South, a sticky rice cake called nian gao is eaten. At midnight, fireworks and firecrackers are set off in celebration.
The festivities carry on for about two weeks. The first day has the lovely tradition of visiting and paying respects to elderly relatives. Young people and kids are given gifts of money in red envelopes.
The Lantern Festival is wonderfully colourful. It happens on the night of the first full moon. As night falls, children carry brightly lit lanterns to the temples. The lanterns are usually red for good luck and some have riddles attached to them to be solved for a small prize. They come in all shapes and sizes – some in the shape of animals. Traditional lanterns are made from paper and wood, but more modern electric and neon ones can be bought too. Kids even learn to carve lanterns out of radishes.
Traditional foods are cooked, especially tang yuan which are rice flour dumplings filled with a sweet or savoury paste. They are served in little round bowls which symbolise family unity.
There are all kinds of activities going on, from parades with giant floats to street performances like stilt walkers. Dancers perform the lion dance and the dragon dance. The lion dance is usually performed by two dancers wearing a huge lion head. The dragon dance is performed by a team of dancers who hold the enormous, long-tailed dragon above them with long poles, moving the tail in a wave-like pattern in time to the beating of the drums. The dragon is often green to represent hopes for a good harvest, though they can come in different colours too. What a spectacular way to end the celebrations!
