Gung hay fat choy! It’s the Year of The Ram, and he was honored, curly horns and all, with his very own parade in Fresno’s Chinatown. The 15th Annual Fresno Chinatown Chinese New Year’s Parade was the second on my list of parades to see in 2015.
Chinese New Year is right around the corner. The streets of Chinatown will be filled with drums, dancing dragons, red lanterns, and confetti. You should also be forewarned that there will also be tons of firecrackers going off all around you.
This year I will have the good fortune of being with my family around Chinese New Year, which is celebrated for up to two weeks after the lunar New Year. Naturally, a whole lot of food is involved with this. Traditionally, the big New Year’s dinner has to happen on the eve of the New Year. I will miss this part with my family, but my mother will send me pictures of the family dinner, I’m sure. There will be plentiful dishes of dumplings, rice, noodles, meats, seafood, tofu, and vegetables, making sure to have food left over to signify abundance in the coming year. With a small circle of friends that represent family to me in New York, I have come up with a way to maximize the food, friends, and family.
Happy Year of the Snake. Be sure to decorate your doors with poems written on red paper scrolls, light your torches and set off fire crackers all night long to scare away the cruel and ferocious beast, Nian. The Cookers and Kibitzers didn’t go that far but we did celebrate Chinese New Year when we got together in February.
Chinese New Year has a few different names. It is also known as Lunar new year, since many Asian cultures celebrate the new year according to the lunar calendar, and it is also called Spring Festival in China. It is not a single day and evening event like we celebrate according to the Gregorian calendar. Chinese New Year is a national holiday that mandates that Chinese citizens have seven days off.
