Spring Festival, also known as the Chinese New Year throughout the west
Date: The first day of the year in the lunar calendar. This is usually in late January or early February.
Place: Nationwide
Activities: Fireworks display, visiting and greeting family and friends, Yangge dancing, lion and dragon dancing, temple fairs, and many other celebrations of Chinese folklore. Yangge dancing originated 2,000 years ago as a religious activity to greet the Gods and dispel evil, but is now a recreational activity during the sowing season and on holidays. It is especially popular among the northern Han.
Remarks: The Spring Festival is the most important festival in China. Beginning the first day of the lunar year, the celebration usually lasts for weeks. Before the event, houses are thoroughly cleaned. Everyone gets a haircut and purchases new clothes. People burn incense at home and in the temples to pay respects to ancestors and to ask the Gods for good health, peace, and luck in the coming year. Red lanterns are hung everywhere. Red scrolls with complementary poetic couplets are pasted at every gate, one line on each side of the gate. On New Year's Eve, families have a reunion feast of jiaozi (dumplings) and niangao (a kind of sticky rice cake), and then stay up and talk through the night, talking about the past and the future.
When the clock rings to announce the arrival of the New Year, many households set off fireworks at almost the same time, creating a thunderous roar and clouds of smoke. This ceremonial use of fireworks is meant to send off the old and usher in the new.
Early the next morning and on the following days, everyone wears new clothes. People pay New Year visits to relatives and friends to extend the New Year's greetings. Cities, rural towns, and villages present waist drum displays, Yangge dancing, lion and dragon
dancing, and other folk dances. There are other grand celebrations, such as the Temple Fairs in Beijing.
Chinese New Year is celebrated by Chinese throughout the world. Wherever one finds large Chinese communities, one finds large celebrations.
The Spring Festival is the most important festival for the Chinese people and is when all family members get together, just like Christmas in the West. All people living away from home go back, becoming the busiest time for transportation systems of about half a month from the Spring Festival. Airports, railway stations and long-distance bus stations are crowded with home returnees.
The Spring Festival falls on the 1st day of the 1st lunar month, often one month later than the Gregorian calendar. It originated in the Shang Dynasty (c. 1600 BC-c. 1100 BC) from the people's sacrifice to gods and ancestors at the end of an old year and the beginning of a new one.
Strictly speaking, the Spring Festival starts every year in the early days of the 12th lunar month and will last till the mid 1st lunar month of the next year. of them, the most important days are Spring Festival Eve and the first three days. The Chinese government now stipulates people have seven days off for the Chinese Lunar New Year.
Many customs accompany the Spring Festival. Some are still followed today, but others have weakened.
On the 8th day of the 12th lunar month, many families make laba porridge, a delicious kind of porridge made with glutinous rice, millet, seeds of Job's tears, jujube berries, lotus seeds, beans, longan and gingko.
The 23rd day of the 12th lunar month is called Preliminary Eve. At this time, people offer sacrifice to the kitchen god. Now however, most families make delicious food to enjoy themselves.
After the Preliminary Eve, people begin preparing for the coming New Year. This is called "Seeing the New Year in".
Store owners are busy then as everybody goes out to purchase necessities for the New Year. Materials not only include edible oil, rice, flour, chicken, duck, fish and meat, but also fruit, candies and kinds of nuts. What's more, various decorations, new clothes and shoes for the children as well as gifts for the elderly, friends and relatives, are all on the list of purchasing.
Before the New Year comes, the people completely clean the indoors and outdoors of their homes as well as their clothes, bedclothes and all their utensils.
Then people begin decorating their clean rooms featuring an atmosphere of rejoicing and festivity. All the door panels will be pasted with Spring Festival couplets, highlighting Chinese calligraphy with black characters on red paper. The content varies from house owners' wishes for a bright future to good luck for the New Year. Also, pictures of the god of doors and wealth will be posted on front doors to ward off evil spirits and welcome peace and abundance.
The Chinese character "fu" (meaning blessing or happiness) is a must. The character put on paper can be pasted normally or upside down, for in Chinese the "reversed fu" is homophonic with "fu comes", both being pronounced as "fudaole." What's more, two big red lanterns can be raised on both sides of the front door. Red paper-cuttings can be seen on window glass and brightly colored New Year paintings with auspicious meanings may be put on the wall.
People attach great importance to Spring Festival Eve. At that time, all family members eat dinner together. The meal is more luxurious than usual. Dishes such as chicken, fish and bean curd cannot be excluded, for in Chinese, their pronunciations, respectively "ji", "yu" and "doufu," mean auspiciousness, abundance and richness. After the dinner, the whole family will sit together, chatting and watching TV. In recent years, the Spring Festival party broadcast on China Central Television Station (CCTV) is essential entertainment for the Chinese both at home and abroad. According to custom, each family will stay up to see the New Year in.
Waking up on New Year, everybody dresses up. First they extend greetings to their parents. Then each child will get money as a New Year gift, wrapped up in red paper. People in northern China will eat jiaozi, or dumplings, for breakfast, as they think "jiaozi" in sound means "bidding farewell to the old and ushering in the new". Also, the shape of the dumpling is like gold ingot from ancient China. So people eat them and wish for money and treasure.
Southern Chinese eat niangao (New Year cake made of glutinous rice flour) on this occasion, because as a homophone, niangao means "higher and higher, one year after another." The first five days after the Spring Festival are a good time for relatives, friends, and classmates as well as colleagues to exchange greetings, gifts and chat leisurely.
Burning fireworks was once the most typical custom on the Spring Festival. People thought the spluttering sound could help drive away evil spirits. However, such an activity was completely or partially forbidden in big cities once the government took security, noise and pollution factors into consideration. As a replacement, some buy tapes with firecracker sounds to listen to, some break little balloons to get the sound too, while others buy firecracker handicrafts to hang in the living room.
The lively atmosphere not only fills every household, but permeates to streets and lanes. A series of activities such as lion dancing, dragon lantern dancing, lantern festivals and temple fairs will be held for days. The Spring Festival then comes to an end when the Lantern Festival is finished.
China has 56 ethnic groups. Minorities celebrate their Spring Festival almost the same day as the Han people, and they have different customs.
Legend of Spring Festival
The Spring Festival is the most important and biggest festival in China. To the Chinese people it is as important as Christmas to people in the West. It is the first day of the lunar calendar and usually occurs somewhere between January 30 and February 20, heralding the beginning of spring, thus it is known as Spring Festival. This traditional festival is also a festival of reunion, thus no matter how far away people are from their home, they would try their best to get back home to have the Reunion Dinner.
The Chinese meaning of this festival is Guo Nian. Guo means pass over and Nian means year. The origin of the Chinese New Year Festival can be traced back thousands of years through a continually evolving series of colorful legends and traditions. According to one of the most famous legends, in ancient China there lived a monster named Year who, with a horn on the head, was extremely ferocious. Year lived deep at the bottom of the sea all the year round and climbed up to the shore only on New Year's Eve to devour the cattle and kill people's lives.
Thereupon on the day of every New Year's Eve people from all villages would flee, bringing along the old and the young, to the remote mountains so as to avoid the calamity caused by the monster of Year.
On the day of that New Year's Eve the people of Peach Blossom village were bringing along the old and the young to take flight when there came from outside the village an old beggar. With a stick in his hand and a bag hanging upon his arm, he had eyes twinkling like stars and graceful beard as white as silver.
Seized with panic, the villagers were in a great hurry to run away. Some were closing the windows and locking the doors, some were packing, and others were urging the cattle and driving the sheep. At a time when the people were shouting and the horses were neighing no one was in the mood to care for the beggar.
Only a grandmother living in the east end of the village gave the old man some food and advised him to flee to the mountains to avoid the Year monster. But the old man stroked his beard and said with a smile, "If you allow me to stay at your home for the night, I'm sure to drive away the monster Year."
The old woman was surprised to hear this. She looked at him unbelievingly only to find that, with white hair and ruddy complexion, the old man had a bearing out of the ordinary. She went on to persuade him to take flight. But he only smiled without reply. Thereupon the grandmother could not help but leave her home and flee to the mountains.
Around midnight the monster Year rushed into the villages. He found the atmosphere was quite different from that of the previous year. The house of the grandmother in the east end of the village was brilliantly illuminated, with bright red paper stuck on the doors. Greatly shocked, the monster gave a strange loud cry.
The monster Year stared angrily at the house for a moment. And then howling furiously, he made a pounce on it. As he approached the door, there came all of a sudden the exploding sounds of bang-bong. Trembling all over, the monster dared not make a step forward.
It turned out that the red color; flame and exploding were what Year feared the most. And when the door of the grandmother's house was thrown open and an old man in a red robe burst out laughing in the courtyard, the monster Year was scared out of his wits and fled helter-skelter.
The next day was the 1st of the first lunar month. When people came back from their hideouts and found everything safe and sound, they were quite surprised. The old woman suddenly realized what had happened and told the villagers about the old beggar's promise.
The villagers swarmed into the grandmother's house, only to find that the doors were struck with red paper, the ember of a pile of bamboo were still giving out exploding sound of bang-bong in the courtyard, and a few candles were still glowing in the room...
The story was soon spread far and wide and everybody was talking about it. They concluded in the end that the old beggar was surely the celestial being who came to expel the calamities and bless the people, and that red paper, red cloth, red candles and the exploding firecracker were certainly the magic weapons to drive out the monster Year.
To celebrate the arrival of the auspiciousness, the raptured villagers put on their clothes and new hats and went one after another to their relatives and friends to send their regards and congratulations. This was soon spread to the surrounding villages, and people all got to know the way to drive away the monster Year.
From then on, on each New Year's Eve, each family stick on their doors antithetical couplets written on red paper, blow up firecrackers, keep their houses brilliantly illuminated and stay up late into the night. Early in the morning of the 1st of the first lunar month they go to their relatives and friends' to send their regards and congratulations. These customs are spreading far and wide and kept for generations. It becomes the most ceremonious traditional festival of the Chinese people.
New Year's Eve Dinner
On the night of New Year's Eve, Chinese families come together for a celebration dinner. This custom is also called "surrounding the hearth," from the custom in earlier times of eating dinner around the family hearth. Both children and adults eat together and dinner begins only after all of the family members are present at the table. A table setting is placed for those unable to come home for dinner on this day to symbolize their presence though far away.
As the nuclear family becomes an increasingly scarce phenomenon in modern society, this symbol of unity takes on increasing significance. New Year's Eve dinner is best eaten slowly, savoring the flavor of each dish. Several of the dishes served on this occasion have auspicious meaning and are indispensable to the night's menu: "Long Year Vegetables" (mustard greens) to represent intelligence; "Whole Chicken," symbolizing wealth for the whole family (since "chicken" and "family" rhyme in the Taiwanese dialect Chinese); and fish balls, shrimp balls, and meat balls are eaten to symbolize the three top scores earned during the civil service examination in ancient China and, by extension, success in educational pursuits. The only dish not included in the cornucopia of food eaten on the New Year's Eve dinner table is whole fish, which is intentionally left off the menu so that "there will be more to come in future years" (since the Chinese words for "fish" and "surplus" rhyme).
Some families will also prepare jiaozi, Chinese dumplings stuffed with meats and vegetables. Since the shape of the dumplings resembles a gold ingot, eating jiaozi symbolizes the calling of wealth into one's life, and some go even as far as to stuff real money in the dumplings to insure that the coming year will bring fortune.