Return to my hometown for Spring Festival

Do you know Chinese New Year?

---------------------------------- YEAR OF THE DOG

The 2018 Chinese New Year begins on Friday, February 16, and the festival will last to March 2nd, about 15 days in total. Chinese families gather together for a reunion dinner on New Year's Eve, and clean their houses to sweep away bad fortune on New Year's Day.

According to the Chinese 12-year animal zodiac cycle, the Chinese year beginning in 2018 is the year of the Dog., and those born in 1946, 1958, 1970, 1982, 1994, 2006, and 2018 are also known as Dogs.

Wish you good luck in the Year of the Dog!

Which Chinese Zodiac sign represents your year of birth?

According to the Chinese culture, your year of birth - and the animal this represents - determines a lot about your personality traits. Anyone born in a dog year will be honest, friendly, faithful, loyal, smart, straightforward, venerable and have a strong sense of responsibility.

The custom of the Spring Festival

A: Hi, Jon, how are you?
B: Not bad, what about you?

A: Very excited, I will return to my hometown for Spring Festival very soon.
B: Good for you.

A: Finally I can go back to stay together with parents, relatives, and old friends.
B: How long is your holiday?

A: 18 days, from Feb.8 to Feb. 26.
B: How will you spend your holiday?

A: Well, almost about visiting relatives, dining and wining. But there are many interesting customs, you know, it's our most important Festival in China. just like Christmas in the West.
B: How will you celebrate your Spring Festival?

A: Different places in China have different way of celebration, but all our wishes are same, wish family members and friends to be healthy and lucky during next year.
B: Yes, same here.

A: We started to prepare for the Spring Festival on Feb. 8th, it is the 23rd of the twlfth month in Lunar Calendar, which we called “Small New Year”, but in some other part of China, 24th is the “Small New Year”.
Everybody buys a lot of things like new clothes and shoes, gifts for friends and relatives, also food including fish and meat, fruit, candies etc.
B: You have so many things to do.

A: Yes. Before Spring Festival, we will do some house cleaning and decorate our house. We will paste couplets on doors.
B: Couplets, I saw that before on TV.

A: Almost every family pastes them, there are good wishes on the couplets.
In north part of China, we also stick paper-cut on our windows.

B: It's beautiful.

A: And we will paste a large Chinese character “fu” on the door. It means good luck and fortune. But we usually put “fu” upside down, in Chinese pronunciation, it means good luck will come.
B: That's interesting.

Nian Gao

Dumpling

New Year's eve family dinner

A: On New Year's Eve, all of our family members stay together, and have a big dinner full of many delicious foods.
We eat 'Nian Gao', made of glutinous rice flour, it means 'up and up every year', and we also have dumpling, it means wealth because its shape looks like “Gold ingot” .
After the big dinner, we went out to set firecrackers. Many children like it a lot.
At 20:00pm, we stay together to watch Spring Festival Gala, and chat happily.
When clock strikes 12 o'clock, that is beginning of New Year, fireworks start again to celebrate this big moment.

B: That must be fantastic.