New Year’s Traditions
This is the second month of 2018, but for us Chinese, today is just the fourth day of the New Year of Dog.
Unlike most of the western countries where people often regard January 1st as the start of a new year, we, as Chinese people, care more about the first day of the Lunar New Year. For us, the Lunar New Year does not only represent the start of a year of a different animal, but more importantly, it is the time for family reunion. As the Lunar New Year is our longest national holiday in China, for the people who work or study in a city or a province far from their home, this may be the only chance for them to go back home and stay with their family for a week or so. Therefore, gradually, the Lunar New Year becomes the most important festival in our minds, and we, of course, create a lot of traditions to celebrate it. For example, we usually eat dumplings or hotpot for dinner with our family on the last day of the previous year and watch the Spring Festival Gala on TV at the same time. Then, at the time it turns to 12 pm, children will start to say greetings to their family and friends. In return, they will always get a red pocket filled with money, which means “Good Luck”, from their family, and another greeting from their friends.
It seems easy to simply say “新年快乐(Xin Nian Kuai Le),” which means “Happy New Year” in English, as the greetings to other people. We actually have many traditions and rules for the greetings, as we always say different phrases to different people.
For example, when we say greetings to the elders, besides saying “Xin Nian Kuai Le,” most of the time we will also say “身体健康,万事如意 (Shen Ti Jian Kang, Wan Shi Ru Yi),” and “福如东海, 寿比南山(Fu Ru Dong Hai, Shou Bi Nan Shan),” which all mean that we wish them to be happy and healthy during the next year. For our parents or their colleagues, besides wishing them to be happy, we may also wish them to be wealthy by saying “恭喜发财(Gong Xi Fa Cai).” Well, for the cousins who may just marry someone, we may say “早生贵子(Zao Sheng Gui Zi)” and wish them to have a baby this year.
The greetings to our family is always extremely formal and may be a little be bored since they are always the same from year to year and from family to family. The greetings to our friends and classmates are much more casual and interesting. Besides saying the traditional greetings like “Xin Nian Kuai le” and “好好学习，天天向上(Hao Hao Xue Xi, Tian Tian Xiang Shang),” which means that we wish them to have good scores next year, we may say something that we know they will like based on our understanding about them. For example, we may wish all of our friends to become more beautiful, as this might be the wish that most of us would like to hear, and if we know that some one likes an idol, we may wish him or her to have the chance to see his or her idol during the new year.
In general, we wish everyone the best, and I believe, even though we may pay more attention to different start day of the new year and have different traditions, this is the same for all the countries in the world.
