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 The Spring Festival is the most important festival for the Chinese people and is when all family members get together, just like Christmas in the West. All people living away from home go back, becoming the busiest time for transportation systems of about half a month from the Spring Festival. Airports, railway stations and long-distance bus stations are crowded with home returnees. |
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Legend of Spring Festival |
The Spring Festival is the first day of the lunar calendar and usually occurs somewhere between January 30 and February 20, heralding the beginning of spring, thus it is known as Spring Festival. This traditional festival is also a festival of reunion, thus no matter how far away people are from their home, they would try their best to get back home to have the Reunion Dinner. |
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Chuxi (New Year’s Eve) is the last evening
of the twelfth lunar month. In Chinese, Chu literally means remove or
change, and Xi means night. Thus Chuxi implies that the old
year ends at this night, and the new one begins tomorrow. |
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During the Spring Festival period,
the northerners eat jiaozi, but southerners like to eat
niangao, New Year's cake. In Chinese, Gao is a homonym for
high. Niangao is also called Nian Nian Gao, which is a homonym
for "higher each year", symbolizing progress and promotion at work and in daily
life and improvement in life year by year. |
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 Since the Spring Festival marks the first day of a brand new year, the first meal is rather important. People from north and south have different habits of the food they eat on this special day. In Northern China, people usually eat jiaozi (or dumpling), which is shaped like a crescent moon. |
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On the Chinese New Year, families in China decorate their front doors with poetic couplets of calligraphy written with fragrant India ink, expressing the feeling of life's renewal and the return of spring.
It is said that spring couplets originated from "peach wood charms", door gods painted on wood charms in earlier times. During the Five Dynasties (907-960), the Emperor Meng Chang inscribed an inspired couplet on a peach slat, beginning a custom which gradually evolved into today's popular custom of pasting-up spring couplets. |
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Spring Festival