What are your traditional Chinese New Year customs?

The Chinese, Manchus and Koreans celebrate the Spring Festival in much the same way, with family reunions, eating rice cakes, dumplings and a variety of hearty meals, displaying lanterns and colorful decorations, setting off firecrackers and wishing each other well.

The celebrations during the Spring Festival are extremely rich and varied, with lion dances, dragon juggling, God tours, New Year's routines, and also stilt walking and dry boat running. In the Lingnan region along the southern coast, people continue to worship their ancestors and honor the gods, praying for good weather conditions, peace and a good harvest in the new year.

China is a multi-ethnic country, and each ethnic group celebrates the New Year in a different way.

Sweeping the dust

The custom of "dusting and sweeping the house on the twenty-fourth day of the Lunar New Year" (also known as sweeping the house) on the eve of the New Year, according to Lü's Spring and Autumn Annals, China had the custom of sweeping the dust on the Chinese New Year's Eve during the Yao and Shun Dynasties.

According to folklore: because the "dust" and "Chen" harmonized, the New Year dust sweeping has "in addition to the meaning of Chen Buxin", the intention is to all the poor luck, bad luck, swept out the door.

Every year, the Chinese New Year is a time to clean up the dust.

Whenever the Spring Festival comes, every household has to clean up the environment, wash all kinds of appliances, dismantle and wash the bedding curtains, sprinkle the six capitals of the courtyard, dusting dust cobwebs, dredge the nullahs and ditches. The whole world is filled with the joy of hygiene, cleanliness, and the joy of the new year.

For thousands of years, every year from the 23rd day of the lunar month to the 30th day of the year, the folk called this period of time "Spring Festival", also known as the "dust day", in the Spring Festival before the dust to engage in sanitation, is the traditional habits of the Chinese people have [18].

New Year's Eve Dinner

New Year's Eve Dinner, also known as the New Year's Reunion Dinner, is an extremely important event for the Chinese people, where the whole family respects and loves each other, and ****sit around the dinner table with a sense of happiness.

People pay great attention to the New Year's Eve "New Year's Eve dinner", in addition to family reunion, gather the joy of heaven, but also pray for a family of large and small safe, working outside the home are rushed back to spend the New Year. [19] The New Year's dinner is the main event of the Spring Festival, not only colorful, but also very important to the meaning.

Before eating the New Year's Eve dinner, ancestors or gods are worshipped, and the meal is served after the incense and candles have been burned. On the table, there are usually chicken (which means to have plans), fish (which means to have more money every year), oyster sauce (which means to have a good market), lettuce (which means to have money), and bean curd bamboo (which means to have plenty of money), and so on, for the sake of good luck.

Watch the New Year's Eve

Watching the New Year's Eve is one of the most important New Year's Eve activities, and the custom of watching the New Year's Eve has a long history.

The earliest record is found in the Western Jin Dynasty Zhou Chu's "Record of Wind and Earth": on the night of New Year's Eve, each with the gift, known as "feed the year"; wine and food are invited, known as "don't the year"; the elders and young people get together to drink, wishing to celebrate the completion of the year, known as the "share the year"; everyone stayed up all night to keep the year-end vigil. "

Since the beginning of the year, the Chinese people have been waiting for the daybreak to come, so it is called "keeping the year-end vigil".

Since the Han Dynasty, the time of the transition between the old and new year is usually the middle of the night. "One night even double the year, five nights divided into two days", New Year's Eve night, the whole family gathered together, ate the New Year's Eve dinner, light up candles or oil lamps, sitting around the stove chatting, waiting for the time to say goodbye to the old and welcome the new, the all-night vigil, symbolizing all the evil plagues and epidemics, light run away, looking forward to a new year of good luck.

Paying New Year's Eve

Paying New Year's Eve visits during the Spring Festival is one of the traditional customs of the Spring Festival, which is a way for people to bid farewell to the old and welcome the new, and to express their good wishes to each other. With the development of the times, the custom of paying New Year's visit has been adding new contents and forms.

Pressing the New Year's money

Each year on New Year's Eve, the elders can be prepared in advance of the New Year's money to be distributed to the younger generation, it is said that the New Year's money can be pressed to the evil spirits, the younger generation to get the New Year's money can be safe and secure through the year.

Posting Spring Festival Couplets

According to the Jade Candle Canon and the Yanjing Yearly Record, the original form of Spring Festival Couplets was what people called the "Peach Symbol".

Extended information:

The Spring Festival, one of the four major traditional Chinese festivals, is traditionally the Lunar New Year. The Spring Festival is commonly known as the "New Year's Day", and is traditionally known as the New Year, the Great Year, the Heavenly Lunar New Year, and the New Year, orally also known as the Year of the Year, the Celebration of the New Year, and the New Year's Day.

The Chinese people have been celebrating the Spring Festival for at least 4,000 years. In folklore, the Spring Festival in the old traditional sense refers to the period from the Lunar New Year's Lunar New Year Festival or the Lunar New Year's 23rd or 24th Zaosai Festival until the 19th day of the first month.

In modern times, people set the Spring Festival on the first day of the first month of the Lunar Calendar, but the New Year is generally not considered over until at least the fifteenth day of the first month of the Lunar Calendar (Shangyuan Festival).

During the Spring Festival, various celebrations are held by the Han Chinese and some ethnic minorities in China.

These activities, which focus on worshipping gods and spirits, paying homage to ancestors, getting rid of the old and bringing in the new, welcoming good fortune, and praying for a good year, take colorful forms and are characterized by a strong sense of ethnicity. Influenced by the Chinese culture, some countries and nationalities belonging to the Chinese cultural circle also have the custom of celebrating the Spring Festival.

The Spring Festival is a festival of joy and harmony, and a time for family reunions. People return home as much as possible to be with their loved ones during the Spring Festival, and during this festival, friends and relatives visit each other to express their affection for each other and their best wishes for the new year.

The Spring Festival is the grandest traditional festival of the Chinese nation, and it is also an important carrier for Chinese people to release their emotions and satisfy their psychological demands, and it is the annual carnival and the eternal spiritual pillar of the Chinese nation.

The Spring Festival, together with the Qingming Festival, Dragon Boat Festival and Mid-Autumn Festival, is known as the four major traditional festivals in China. The "Spring Festival" folklore was approved by the State Council to be included in the first batch of national intangible cultural heritage list.