The Spring Festival and Special Greetings
“新春快乐!恭喜发财!(Happy new spring, wish you can earn more this year!)” Those two sentences are the most common greetings someone would hear during the Chinese Lunar New Year. Though we call it Lunar New Year, but it also has another name which is “the Spring Festival.” We call it “the Spring Festival” is because it stands for the starting of the new spring, and it marks the end of the winter which farmers are unable to plant anything. We have an old saying says that “一年之计在于春，一日之计在于晨。(Make your plan of the year in the spring, and your plan of the day in the morning.)”This saying tells how spring has a symbolic meaning as the start of something new to Chinese society. The spring also has similar social meaning to other culture in their early agricultural society stages. So it is something that is worthy to celebrate and something happy about, which leads to the formation of the greeting as saying “Happy new spring!” instated of simply saying “Happy new year!”
The second sentence is to wish people can earn more in the next year, which become more and more popular in recent years. A famous singer Andy Lau even sang a song named the same as the greeting “恭喜发财.” The “恭喜” means the person who is saying this is greeting the happiness of the one who he’s speaking. Thus it will be more serious and be used on important occasions. Greeting “发财” is not just simply as earning more, it has the meaning of getting rich by chance or relying on one’s luck. It has this meaning because, in Chinese culture, people believe that a person’s luck is significant and it will influence the life of the person greatly, or at least the following year. So if one is having a great year and a lot of good thing happened to him, it means he’s luck is with him.
Also most of the other greetings such as “吉祥如意(Wish the good luck is with you, and everything will be as you wish.)，事业有成(Have a great success on a career.)，阖家欢乐(Wish you and your whole family be happy.)。.” I found that all these greetings are in the four letters which is simple to remember, and also catchy in sound. No matter in what order you combine these greetings people can read it smoothly and catch the rhyme easily. This habit is the presentation of the traditional writing and speaking habits of Chinese. In traditional writing and speaking, a letter could express a lot of meanings, so usually, the sentence will be very concise and comparatively short. They also value the beauty of the rhyme of a passage highly. Thus it is important for a greeting to sound smooth. From the language, it reflects what the people who speak it thinks. Thus it reflects the idea of the group and implies the culture’s value.
