The Spring Festival
The Spring Festival
I bet you have heard about The Spring Festival holiday. But do you know when we have started to celebrate this holiday and why it’s so important for us? Now let’s find out together.
In 2006, the Spring Festival was listed by the Chinese State Council in the first batch of Intangible Cultural Heritage of the country.
The Spring Festival, also known as the Lunar New Year, is the grandest traditional festival in China. It has a long history and can be traced back to the ancient time, when people worshiped the Heaven at the beginning of the lunar year, an activity first recorded in the Western Han Dynasty (202BC-8AD). From then on the customs were widely spread and came in many forms.
How we celebrate it?
- Worshiping the Heaven and ancestors
- Staying up all night on New Year's Eve to welcome the coming New Year.
- Watch The spring festival gala
- Putting couplets
- Paying New Year visits
- Setting off fireworks and firecrackers
- Enjoying the lion dance
- Watch Dragon-lantern shows
- Go to the Temple fairs
How about the people who have left their hometown?
When the festival is drawing near, they will manage to return home to celebrate the New Year’s Eve with their family.
These days, we still do like this, but more people would like to take this opportunity to travel inbound and outbound. One of my previous colleagues even travelled to the south of Argentina and the nearest place to Antarctica to see penguins.
When we started to celebrate it as an annual public holiday?
Since 1949 Chinese people have enjoyed the annual public holiday of the Spring Festival and we have 7 days off. Although after 7 days off, most people start to work, people who starts to work on the first day, they will receive some lucky money from their company, we call it 开工 ( gōng ) 大 ( dà ) 吉 ( jí ) . Normally we could get CNY 100 or 200 lucky money.
However the New Year celebration hasn’t finished yet, it may last until the Lantern.
