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Year of Goat

Chinese New Year is an important traditional Chinese holiday celebrated at the turn of the Chinese calendar. In China, it is also known as the Spring Festival, the literal translation of the modern Chinese name. Chinese New Year celebrations traditionally run from Chinese New Year's Eve, the last day of the last month of the Chinese calendar, to the Lantern Festival on the 15th day of the first month, making the festival the longest in the Chinese calendar. Because the Chinese calendar is lunisolar, the Chinese New Year is often referred to as the "Lunar New Year". (Wikipedia)

Traditions

Chinese New Year celebrations were born out of fear and myth. Legend spoke of the wild beast Nien (which also is the word for “year”) that appeared at the end of each year, attacking and killing villagers. Loud noises and bright lights were used to scare the beast away, and the Chinese New Year celebrations were born. Today, the 15-day New Year festivities are celebrated with a week of vacation in metropolitan areas of China. Much like the Western New Year (January 1st), the biggest celebration is on the eve of the holiday. At the turn of the new year, firework displays are put on throughout the city.

Aside from New Year’s Eve, there are other important days of the 15-day New Year Festival, including:

JIE CAI CENG: Welcoming the Gods of Wealth and Prosperity

On the 5th day of New Year’s, it is believed that the gods of prosperity come down from the heavens. Businesses will often participate in setting off firecrackers as they believe it will bring them prosperity and good fortune for their business.

YUAN XIAO JIE: Festival of Lanterns

The 15th day of the New Year is known as The Festival of Lanterns and marks the end of the Chinese New Year celebrations. All types of lanterns are lit throughout the streets and often poems and riddles are often written for entertainment. There are also paper lanterns on wheels created in the form of either a rabbit or the animal of the year (Goat for 2015). The rabbit lantern stems from a Chinese myth or fairytale about a female goddess named “Chang E” who jumped onto the moon. So she wouldn’t travel alone, she brought a rabbit with her to keep her company. It is said that if your heart is pure enough, you can see the goddess Chang E and her rabbit on the moon on this day.

Symbols

Red envelopes

Called “hong bao” in Mandarin, the red envelopes filled with money are typically given to children or unmarried adults with no job. If you’re single and working and making money, you still have to give the younger ones the hong bao money.

Dragon

The Dragon is present in many Chinese cultural celebrations as the Chinese people often think of themselves as descendants of the mythical creature. On the fifth day of the New Year when many people have to start going back to work, they will also have the Dancing Dragons perform in the front of the office building. On the 15th day of the New Year (Yuan Xiao Jie), they will also have a lot of dancing dragon performances. The dragon represents prosperity, good luck and good fortune.

Traditional Food

The Chinese New Year’s Eve meal is the most important dinner of the year. Typically, families gather at a designated relative’s house for dinner, but these days, many families often celebrate New Year’s Eve dinner at a restaurant. Many restaurants require reservations months in advance. There are also some families that hire a professional chef to come cook at their house. Chefs are often busy running from one home to another cooking dinners for different families on New Year’s Eve.

Chinese New Year is a 15-day celebration and each day, many families rotate celebrations between homes of their relatives. The festivies are day-long and sometimes, a family ends up cooking two meals for their relatives, once at lunch and once at dinner. These dishes used to be all made from scratch, but now people can easily buy them prepackaged at the supermarkets.

Eight Treasures Rice (contains glutinous rice, walnuts, different colored dry fruit, raisins, sweet red bean paste, jujube dates, and almonds).

“Tang Yuan” – black sesame rice ball soup; or a Won Ton soup.

Chicken, duck, fish and pork dishes.

“Song Gao”, literally translates to “loose cake”- which is made of rice which has been coursely ground and then formed into a small, sweet round cake.

“Jiu Niang Tang” – sweet wine-rice soup which contains small glutinous rice balls

Chinese New Year (CNY) 2015 itself, is celebrated on February 19th, which is the year of goat. Just like all the years before, me and my family, as most other Chinese-blooded families do, still hold on to the tradition of going to our relatives' houses and have a chit-chat, socialize and do many things. This is called Bai Jia. Married people will give you hong bao. And one thing, during Chinese New Year, you can find lots of food from snacks to various traditional meals. Usually, my siblings have this layered cake called Kue Lapis, Nastar which is a sort of dry cake shaped like a ball that contains pineapple jam and also some fruits such as oranges.

During Chinese New Year, there are still some old traditions that we still hold on to, for example - there's a myth that during CNY, people aren't allowed to broom their houses because it is said that doing this, could brush away the luck and happiness. There are dozens of other Chinese myths.

Chinese New Year is most likely to be associated with the colour red which denotes good luck/fortune and happiness/abundance in the Chinese Culture and is also often worn or used for decoration in other celebrations. During the Chinese New Year festival, usually there's this kind of traditional chinese clothing called cheongsam or qipao.