The Importance of Chinese New Year

The Chinese New Year, also recognised as Lunar New Year, is the most significant and thrilling holiday for the Chinese culture. The New Year marks the beginning of a new year that starts on the second new moon and lasts for twenty-three days. It is the time of year for friends and families to visit each other, prepare exceptional food for big dinners with close friends and relatives enjoy a day of gifts giving and fireworks. Lunar New Year celebrates a Chinese zodiac sign that cycles liable on what year it is. This year, 2020, is the year of the Rat, and those who are born in the year of the Rat are generally considered smart, charming, and ambitious.

The importance of Chinese New Year has been grown since beginning over 3800 years ago, not only in China but also across the world. From homegrown traditions to international celebrations, the Chinese New Year holiday is helping spread Chinese culture worldwide. Most of the world set off fireworks on January first each year to celebrate New Year, while China patiently waits until the first day of the lunar calendar, which usually falls between late January and early February to kick off a celebration of the Chinese New Year. Though Lunar Year has originated in the ancestor worship of the Shang dynasty people, today, the holiday is about spending time with family members, friends, and sharing blessings and abundance with loved ones. But even more than that, it’s a period to forget about school and work, exchange large sums of money, light up the sky with fireworks, and eat until you can eat no more.

The Chinese New Year is also about spreading Chinese culture across the world. For example, few non-Chinese people could easily name Mid-Autumn Festival or Golden Week or two other major Chinese holidays, but nearly almost everyone can name the New Year. Many also correctly associate the holiday with the colour red, firecrackers, large paper lanterns, and lion dances. This knowledge is spread across the globe because of Chinese immigrants who have spread their traditions to their new homes in the UK, Canada, the United States, Australia, and elsewhere.

Migration from China to the United States started during the mid-1800s. Initially, they faced harsh discrimination; the politicians blamed them for keeping wage levels low. The Chinese migrants in different cities of the United States decided to meet this aggression with a festive celebration and threw a Lunar New Year’s celebration to showcase the positive aspects of their culture. Since that, the sentiments towards Chinese immigrants have fortunately improved; still, the parade is being thrown to this day, and the same parades exist in New York’s Chinatown, London’s Trafalgar Square, and even Helsinki, Finland. Even many of the best places to celebrate the Lunar New Year are outside of China itself. You might be dissatisfied if you travel to big Chinese cities such as Shanghai for the Chinese New Year holidays and learn that the city is nearly empty of people. Where are the fireworks and parades there? In China, the New Year is typically celebrated one of two ways, either by going home to one’s village or by travelling. Therefore, the big cities do not contain the celebration one would expect.

Lunar New Year is often the one time of the year when migrant workers get to go home. They fill up planes, trains, and buses bringing with them mementos of their big-city lives to excite their older family members who stayed behind in the villages. The real celebrations of Chinese New Year take place in the villages. Adults and children set off firecrackers to scare off the mythical Nian monster; kids receive red envelopes filled with large sums of money.

Also, the Chinese New Year can be celebrated at famous Asian temples and introduced by igniting firecrackers with performances of lion dancing and praying for good luck. Chinese New Year is mostly famous for its celebration of entertainment. Lion dancing is an excellent entertainment that is adored by many people, especially children. Lion dancing is when a group of people play instruments and wear mythical Chinese lion clothes that need two people to dance in forms that ward off evil spirits, mostly at temples for safety and good luck.

Many firecrackers come in packs that can be laid out six feet long or even longer. Red is the luckiest colour of Lunar New Year, so for good luck, red envelopes filled with money are given out to the children. The red envelopes containing money are called Hongbao, which is known as ‘lucky money’ is given mainly by the elders and handed to young people. Chinese New Year means a lot to the Chinese community. It helps bring friends and family together, celebrating the New Year and forgetting about things that we do not usually want to focus on and just focus on the luck of the New Year can contain. Many celebrations filled with parties, firecracker events, lion dancing performances, praying to those who need luck, and those who have passed.