Spring Festival, also called Chinese New year, is an old traditional celebration in the beginning of each lunar year in china. It is normally in the late January or early February. It is more like a family festival. All the relatives will gather to have a special lunar New year’s Eve dinner together. No matter how far away you live away from your family, that night you would be there to have the dinner with your family members. The whole celebration lasts for a week.
Spring festival also involves some old superstitious customs. Most of those customs involves good wishes for the coming year. In the celebration week, no one will cook or clean the house, otherwise it means you will have a hard life in the next year. Or in the New year’s Eve dinner, everybody must eat a little fish, green vegetable and bean sprouts. Those dishes symbolize health, prosperity and peace. The biggest custom is for every family to light fireworks at midnight to scatter the evil spirit “Niam”.
For fathers, they must start to prepare for the festival at least one week prior. For mothers, even earlier. Preparing for the Spring festival is not easy job for them. They have to clean the house sparkling clean, prepare the main dinner for the family and enough food for the next. After the dinner, they need to clean everything before midnight. Pry the time midnight comes, they are exhausted.
But for the kids, Spring Festival is the biggest event in the year. Just after one Spring festival is finisher, they already start waiting for the next one. They could have new winter clothes and shoes which they only got once a year.
During the spring festival or the new year dinner, all the kids would get a red envelop from each older relatives, it is called “Hong Bao”. Kids could use this money to buy comic books or some can dies. After dinner, the whole family sit around the table, talking, gossiping and eating peanuts, milk candies, and sweet cakes that they can only have during the spring festival.
During the period of the spring festival families are very careful about the evil spirit called “Nian”, which only comes out once a year at midnight.
This is the spring festival which is also called Chinese New year, when family, together make good wishes for the coming new year.