Celebrating Spring Festival in China: A Personal Experience of the Lunar New Year Tradition
Chengdu, China:
Ever since I have been coming to China as a Tour Director people have ask me if I have ever been to their biggest holiday, Spring Festival. I got the feeling it was big but until this year I did not know how big. This year I have been in China and decided to stay and see what really happens on the Lunar New Year.
The Lunar New Year started at midnight February 9. I guess if you were going to compare it with a western holiday, it would be Christmas Eve. Everywhere I have gone the stores are closed and I think almost every person has returned home to be with their families. We are, as I write, in the fifth day of the holiday and the stores still have not opened. The newspapers are not being printed.
Experiencing the Family-Centered Festivities
I was invited by one of my Chinese guides, Carol Feng, to come to her hometown, which is Chengdu to celebrate Spring Festival. Today we had a dinner with her mother’s family and tomorrow we will have another dinner with her father’s family. The rest of the week people visit other relatives, go to the parks and just enjoy being together with their families.
Special Foods and Family Gatherings
Carol’s father said that in the history of China, Spring Festival has always been a time when everyone returned to be with the family. I was in a small food market and heard someone speak good English. I complemented him on his English. He told me that he was from Chengdu but came home from America to be with his family for the holiday.
Carol told me that preparing special food and eating together is the most important part of the holiday. Today Carol’s father was the cook. We had four generations gathered together. He prepared one dish for each person. Her father loves to cook so he did all of the shopping and all of the preparation of the food. (The food was mostly vegetables as her grandmother feels that vegetables are the healthiest food to eat.) Because the father cooked, her mother cleaned up the dishes (the kitchen was only large enough for one dishwasher).
In the photograph you can see all the dishes that were prepared. The part that was most interesting to me was it only took him about 30 minutes to cook the dishes but it took him 3 to 4 hours to cut up all the vegetables. A Chinese kitchen is very simple. No fancy machines to do the work. The basics are the same, a butcher block to cut on, one knife to do all of the cutting, a wok to cook in and a gas fire to heat the wok. A large spatula with an edge on it is used to stir and measure the ingredients.
Community and Family Unity During Spring Festival
After the dinner we went out walking and it looks like half the city were in the park playing together. It is truly inspiring to see a country of 1.3 billion people stop their work and return home for a week to two weeks to enjoy and celebrate their families.
