There are many holidays throughout the year that we celebrate in the United States. From Christmas to Easter and all the weird ones that come in between, holidays are an exciting part of life. Yet, in recent times, there have been holidays from other cultures that have bled into our culture a bit. Sometimes we want to celebrate them and other times we want to just know about their history because we live, here, in the United States. One of those holidays is called the Chinese New Year.
Chinese New Year is a wonderful holiday that is celebrated in between January 21 and February 20th, where the full moon falls. It is sometimes also called the Spring Festival. Although the New Years of our calendar is celebrated on January 1, this New Years celebrates a different calendar. Chinese New Year is an important festival that celebrates the turn of the traditional unipolar Chinese Calendar. Although this may seem odd to us Americans, this is only one of the many New Year’s holidays that are celebrated in Asia. Although this holiday runs on one day, their celebrations go for longer lengths of time. Starting the eve of the day, celebrations will continue up until the fifteenth of the first calendar month. In China, this is a very exciting holiday that people wait all year to experience.
The celebration is mainly about the mass celebration of migration in the world. This holiday affects other New Year holidays in countries of Asia like Korea and Vietnam. Along with this celebration, ancestors and Gods of all kinds are lifted high and acknowledged. Chinese New Years is a celebration of life, so you will find events such as reunion dinners with family, house cleaning in order to bring in good fortune and good luck, and even the doors and windows are decorated with red paper couplets and cut-outs that deliver the greetings of happiness and good fortune. You may find other activities taking place such as the lighting of fire crackers and giving envelopes to each other with money. In most meals, you will also find dumplings as a common food item.
China is a beautiful country and their holidays resemble love, grace, and excitement. Although this holiday is not a huge one in the United States, their celebrations still can resemble how we can better understand the coming of a New Year and what it means for our lives.
