Chinese New Year - Spring Festival
Spring Festival has 15 days celebration. It’s so important that all people living away will go home, makes Spring Festival be the busiest time for transportation systems. Airports, railway stations and long-distance bus stations are crowded with home returners. As a matter of fact, it’s crazy busy everywhere, including the store owners, farmers etc.
People will completely clean everywhere of their houses when The New Year almost arrives, including their clothes, bedclothes, tables, chairs etc. They will also start to decorate their clean houses with very warm and joyful atmosphere. All the panels of the door pasted with Spring Festival couplets which are in the nice Chinese calligraphy with black characters on red paper. The content of couplets includes wishes for a bright future, good luck etc. Especially, Chinese people love the character "fu", which means happiness and luck. Chinese also love to paste by the "reversed fu" which means "fu comes". Some people will paste the Gods pictures on front doors to drive evil spirits away and bless peace and abundance. Also,the big red lanterns will be hung on both sides of the front door for showing the hot atmosphere and bright future. Red paper-cuttings can be seen on window glass and brightly colored New Year paintings with auspicious meanings may be put on the wall.
All family members will eat dinner together in Spring Festival Eve (people name it Da Nian San Shi). Many tasteful dishes will be put on the table, including chicken, fish and bean curd. The pronunciations of these dishes in chinese, respectively "ji", "yu" and "doufu," mean auspiciousness, abundance and richness. Watching CCTV is a must in this evening after dinner, it’s also good for family chatting together, usually they will stay up to see the New Year in after 12:00 pm.
On the first day of Chinese New Year, people will give money to their kids as a New Year gift, wrapped up in red paper, stands for luck and happiness. Northern chinese will eat jiaozi, or dumplings, for breakfast, Southern Chinese will eat niangao. The first five days of a New Year are a good time for relatives, friends, classmates and colleagues to greet each other. Before the Lantern Festival, many kinds of interesting activities will be held, such as playing fireworks, lion dancing and dragon lantern dancing etc The Spring Festival ends by the Lantern Festival finished.
Even though China has 56 ethnic groups, the Chinese minorities celebrate their Spring Festival almost the same day as the Han people, so does the Zhuang Minority in Yangshuo Guangxi.
