Spring Festivals

How do Chinese people celebrate the Spring Festival?

Spring Festival is a time for celebrating with family and friends. No matter wherever, how busy they are, the Chinese will squeeze into the roads going home to spend the festival season with their family members. Traditionally, the Chinese celebrate the Spring Festival in the following ways:        

Spring Cleaning: From December 23rd in the Chinese calendar, people begin to clean their houses to bid farewell to the old year and usher in a happy and fresh new year.

Spring Decorating: People hang flower-decorated red lanterns in front of their houses. Office buildings and stores are also decorated with red lanterns. Red couplets-red posters with black Chinese calligraphy, colored New Year paintings are posted on the doors of people’s houses. They symbolize happiness, prosperity and good luck in the New Year.

New Year's Feast: Spring Festival is a time for family reunion. The New Year's Feast is "a must" banquet with all the family members getting together. People from north and south have different sayings about the food they eat on this special day. Southern Chinese eat "niangao" (New Year cake made of glutinous rice flour) on this occasion, because as a homophone, niangao means "higher and higher every year". In northern China, a traditional dish for the feast is "Jiaozi" or dumplings shaped like a crescent moon.

Lighting Firecrackers: Lighting Firecrackers used to be one of the most important customs in the Spring Festival celebration. But concerning the danger and the negative noises that lighting firecrackers may bring the government has banned this practice in many major cities. But people in small towns and rural areas still hold to this traditional celebration. Right as the clock strike 12 o'clock midnight of New Year's Eve, cities and towns are lit up with the glitter from fireworks, and the sound can be deafening. Families stay up for this joyful moment and kids with firecrackers in one hand and a lighter in another cheerfully light their happiness in this especial occasion, even though they plug their ears.

Luck Money: It is the money given to kids from their parents and grandparents as New Year gift. The money is believed to bring good luck, ward off monsters; hence the name"lucky money". Parents and grandparents first put money in small, especially made red envelope and give to their kids after the New Year's Feast. It is one of the kids’ favorite things in Spring Festival.

New Year Greetings: On the first day of the new year, everybody wears new clothes and greets relatives and friends with bows and Gongxi( congratulations), wishing each other good luck, happiness during the new year.