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The Spring Festival
21 Jan, 2004
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The Spring Festival is the first day in Chinese lunar calendar. It is one of the most important traditional anniversaries for Chinese people all over the world. This year, Jan.22nd is the Spring Festival. It is a day for people to celebrate the past and look ahead with joy to the future.
Just as Western Christmas Eve, on the New Year’s Eve, all Chinese families get together a rich feast. Most people would stay up until midnight. In Chinese, it is called “Sou Sui (Waiting for the New Year)”. When the clock strikes twelve, people would congratulate with each other saying “Guo Nian Hao (Happy New Year)”. Celebration firecracker can be heard here and there. The whole community is immersed in a festival atmosphere.
The next day, people will visit their neighbors, friends and kin by carrying their gifts. On the Spring Festival, no one will be happier than the children. Besides all kinds of gifts desired for a long time, they can also receive “Red Pocket (pocket money)” from the adults as a kind of bless.
As a way to help with memorization, ancient Chinese people wisely adopted 12 kinds of animals to symbolize each year. The animals sequentially are Rat, Ox, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Sheep, Monkey, Rooster, Dog and Pig. And the year 2004 is also called the Year of the Monkey. The system is very practical. A child does not have to learn a new answer to the questions “How old are you?” Old people often lose track of their age, because they rarely asked about their current age. Every one just has to remember that he or she was born in the year of the Monkey or whatever.
“Fu” is a lucky word - it mean lucky. Around the Chinese New Year, people often put up a poster with this word on it - upside down (it mean lucky is coming)! During the Spring Festival, Chinese people also would put up a couplet, unit of verse consisting of two successive lines, usually rhyming and having the same meter and often forming a complete thought or syntactic unit.
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