Chinese New Year Celebration is the most important celebration of the year. Chinese people may celebrate the Chinese New Year in slightly different ways but their wishes are almost the same; they want their family members and friends to be healthy and lucky during next year.
Chinese New Year Celebration usually lasts for 15 days. Celebratory activities include Chinese New Year Feast, firecrackers, giving lucky money to children, the New Year bell ringing, and Chinese New Year Greetings. Most Chinese people will stop celebrating in their home on the 7th day of New Year because the national holiday usually ends around that day, however celebrations in public areas can last until the 15th day of New Year.
House Cleaning
To clean houses on the New Year Eve is a very old custom dating back to thousands of years ago. The dust is traditionally associated with “old” so cleaning their houses and sweeping the dust means to bid farewell to the “old” and usher in the “new”. Days before the New Year, Chinese families clean their houses, sweeping the floor, washing daily things, cleaning the spider webs, and dredging the ditches. People do all these things happily in the hopes of a good coming year.
House decoration
One of the traditional house decorations is to post couplets on doors. On the Spring Festival couplets, good wishes are expressed. New Year couplets are usually posted in pairs as even numbers are associated with good luck and auspiciousness in Chinese culture.
People in northern China are used to posting decorative paper-cuts on their windows. When sticking the window decorative paper-cuts, people paste on the door large a red Chinese character A red means good luck and fortune, so it is customary to post on doors or walls on auspicious occasions such as wedding, festivals.
123456Couplets
The couplets of the Spring Festival are couplets hung on the columns of a hall on Spring Festival’s Eve. It is called “Chun Lian” (春联) in Chinese. Being a unique literary form to China, the Couplets of the Spring Festival mostly describe the bustling atmosphere during the Spring Festival and express Chinese people’s hopes for prosperity in the New Year.
The origin of the couplets of the Spring Festival is “Tao Fu” (peach wood charms against evil). The history of Tao Fu can be traced back to more than 3000 years ago. At that time, people wrote the names of two gods who can control evil spirits on two pieces of peach wood. Tao Fu evolved into today’s couplets in Spring Festival during the Song Dynasty (960 A.D. — 1279 A.D.), and the peach wood was gradually replaced by two pieces of paper.
Except that the couplets of the Spring Festival in Buddhist temples are written on yellow paper, the couplets are usually written on red paper because red is the color of peach wood, and the color of red can bring good luck and defeat evil spirits. However, when there is a death in the family, the younger generation of the deceased cannot use red paper to write couplets of Spring Festival for three years in a row. They use white paper in the first year, green paper in the second year, and yellow paper in the last year. In some places, the younger generation even cannot use couplets during Spring Festival for three years to show their respect for the deceased.
Mostly, the couplets of Spring Festival are glued to the front door frame. Sometimes, families also paste couplets on the doors of the pigpen, kennel, pheasantry, and so on, hoping that the domestic animals are all thriving and healthy. Some families even paste couplets on both sides of the picture or statue of a god or the Buddha, hoping that the god or Buddha can bless the whole family and give them a smooth and prosperous year.
Generally, The Spring Couplet is composed of two antithetical sentences on both sides of the door. The couplets are read from top to bottom and the first line starts from the right. Apart from the two lines, some couplets even have a horizontal scroll bearing an inscription, usually an auspicious phrase, above the gate. It is read from right to left.
