Chinese New Year - The Spring Festival
The first day of the first lunar month in the Chinese calendar is called the Spring Festival (Chun Jie - 春节). It is the most important festival to the Chinese people. Spring Festival was originated in primitive society where people would offer a sacrifice to the Heaven by slaughtering pigs and sheep, praying for good weather and for good crops, the flourishing of men and livestock, and the escape of misfortune and disaster. The celebration starts from the evening of the last day in the previous year to the fifteenth day of the first lunar month in the new year.
It is extemely important for the Chinese people to get together with other family members during the Spring Festival. The evening before the Spring Festival is similiar to the New Year's Eve in the western culture. Similar to the Christmas Eve, there must be a luxurious dinner for the family reunion. After the meal, the family will sit and chat the whole night, drinking wine or watch nation-wide celebration programs on TV, waiting for the first daybreak of a new year. At the time, the elderly will give "red envelopes" ( money as a gift for the lunar New Year) to children.
There is a huge variety of dishes being served on the New Years' Eve, but Dumplin is probably the most common food item prepared for special evening. Not only because it is delicious, but it implies the "happy reunion" and "good luck for the new year". To have good luck, dumplins in many places have been intentionally made looking like gold ingot used as money in feudal China, hoping to make a fortune in the coming year. In some places, people use peanut kernels as fillers inside the dumplins, as peanut kernel has also been called "the long-live fruit". People wish, after eating them, that they will he healthy and have a long life. Rice cake and fish are also popular food items during the Spring Festival.
Chines people also set off firecrackers to celebrate the coming of New Year, which is a custom of more than 2, 000 years in history. Legend goes that there was a monster during ancient times who would come out and hunt people in early Spring. However the monster is scared of loud noises. So every family would set off firecrackers to scare the monster away. The earliest firecrakers were made by putting explosives into a thick bamboo tube. Later on, Chinese people learned to wrap the explosives in papers and use strings as fuses for explosion.
Pay a New Year call is another traditional custom during the Spring Festival. Even today Chinese will pay New Year calls or send greetings to each other. But in the past the custom was a bit complicated. The young had to bow and worship on bended knees for the elderly, and people of the same generation would have to make to each other a cupped- hand salute. Senior officials in feudal China considered it time-consuming to pay each other New Year calls, so they sent each other cards instead for greetings, which was the start of "New Year Cards".
During the Festival time, people will write on red paper words about celebration or luck and paste them on gates or door panels. The Red Couplets of every family are imortant decrations of the important holiday, kind of like the pumpkins during Halloween.
Putting up New Years' painiting is yet another customary practice for the Festival celebration since ancient times. On the New Year paintings are usually legendary characters worshiped as door-gods. Later people put in pictures heroes in different periods of history. Today New Year pictures often describe people's wishes for happiness, longevity, good harvest, and a good fortune.
Besides, during festival celebration, people will have such recreational activities as playing lion-dances, playing dragon lantern and walking on stilts, all for good luck in the new year.
