Spring Festival 2008 [恭喜鼠年发大财]
This is my first time going thru a real Spring Festival in China. At Shanghai, Spring Festival has become half traditional and half commercial. People do get together during the New Year Eve [大年夜] and the 1st January of lunar calendar [阴历] to have a big meal with the whole family, but that’s it. Normally every family should go to visit every other relative family during subsequent days, by order of importance or closeness, and then close friends, and so on. Nowaday, people simply send a SMS to a long list of people in the phone as subsitute for the real visit [拜年]. China Mobile is expecting Chineses to send 1.6 billion phone messages within the first three days of the rat year.
Another important tradition is the crackers and fireworks. During the night of new year eve, from 8PM to 1AM, I can hear crackers at every minute, and fireworks can be seen in every corner of the view from my 20th floor apartment’s windows. Some of the fireworks can be very expensive, up to 10,000 RMB a box. To fire continously during several hours, they must have burned more than a hundred boxes of fireworks for each individual, that’s incredible amount of money gone in the air! But that’s the tradition!
At the 4th January night, there’s another tradition to welcome the God of Fortune [迎财神]. Based on the amount of crackers and fireworks, I can tell that this is as important as the new year itself, if not more. Again, I heard crackers continuously from everywhere, and fireworks were all over the place from my window.
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Unfortunately for me, I was sick before and during the Spring Festival breaks, so I pretty much spent that whole week resting at home. But then I was thinking to myself, luckly that was a holiday week, otherwise I would have asked for a week of sick leave… So, bottom line for me is a full week of crackers and fireworks and sickness. I hope this rat year brings health and peace to my whole family and all my friends.