General house cleaning
After the Preliminary Eve, people begin preparing for the coming Spring
Festival. Families are busy giving their home a thorough cleaning. The houses,
clothes, bedclothes and all utensils are completely cleaned, to bid farewell to
the old year and to usher in the new. It is believed the cleaning sweeps away
bad luck and makes the house ready for good luck to enter. All brooms and dust
pans are put away on New Year's Eve so good luck cannot be swept away.
Storeowners are busy as everybody goes purchasing for the New Year, from
edible oil, rice, chicken, fish and meat, to fruit, candies and nuts, and to
various decorations, new clothes and shoes for children as well as gifts for
friends and relatives. Red couplets are pasted on the door panels, together with
beautiful window flowers, colorful New Year paintings and red lanterns,
all giving a happy and prosperous atmosphere of the coming festival.
New Year's Eve &
jiaozi
The 1st day of the 1st lunar month is the Spring Festival,
or China's New Year, just like Christmas in the West. It falls accurately on
February 9 of the 2005 Gregorian calendar.
It is a festival of family reunion. On New Year's Eve, the last evening of
the twelfth lunar month, having a reunion dinner, sacrificing to the ancestors,
watching Spring Festival Party on CCTV,
burning fireworks and staying up late to guard the New Year in, are the major
activities. The houses are lit up brightly with lamps both outside and inside of
the house.
People in northern China eat jiaozi, or dumplings shaped like gold ingots,
symbolizing the good wishes for wealth. Southerners eat niangao, or New Year
cake made of glutinous rice flour, which is a homonym for "higher each year",
symbolizing progress and promotion at work and improvement in life year by year.
Waking up on the first day of the new year, everybody dresses up. The
children will get hongbao (small red envelopes with gift money in it) from their
parents, grandparents and elder relatives. The first five days of the festival
are a good time for relatives, friends and colleagues to pay New Year calls or
bainian in Chinese, exchanging greetings and gifts. People swarm into the
streets to watch dragon
dances, lion dances, yangge, walking
on stilts and drums dance, etc.
Married daughters return to parents'
home
On the second day of the New Year the married daughters, together with their
husbands and children, will go back to their parents' house for the reunion
dinners, to show their respect and deep affection. Bringing along with them are
the presents of waxed ducks, sausage meat, chickens, ducks, fruit, confectionary
and the most important thing is the Hongbao or red packets containing present
money. After lunch or dinner the married daughters will return home with
presents given by the parents. In the olden time when it was a great distance to
walk to the parents' place the married daughters might stay for a few days
there.
