Celebrating the Year of the Snake
Rachel Lim, Welfare and Community Officer, shares what Spring Festival means to her during a time of celebration and new beginnings.
New Year is like Christmas around Asia, being the main holiday where families get together, eat lots of food, and get ready for a fresh year ahead. This year’s Chinese zodiac sign is the Wood Snake, symbolizing profound renewal, fresh beginnings, and transformative growth.
A time for transformation
The Year of the Snake is celebrated across Asia and globally where there’s a large Asian or Chinese diaspora. The New Year follows a lunar or lunisolar calendar across Asia, following the moon, which is why it doesn’t coincide with the Gregorian calendar starting January 1st. We start with a deep cleaning to sweep all the bad luck and the ‘old’ of the year before the first day, and avoid cleaning, cutting your hair, or buying new shoes for the next 15 days so as to not cut away good luck or invoke poverty.
A time with family and friends
Growing up in Hong Kong, celebrating our New Year is the largest and most exciting celebration in the calendar. It means seeing all my family, eating tons of candies, dried fruits, and nuts, and remembering tons of greetings, wishing everything from health, wealth, and happiness, to impress my grandparents the most for 利是 (lai see in Cantonese, 红包 hóngbāo in Mandarin)- decorated red envelopes with money inside.
We celebrate the defeat of the monster Nian (translates to ‘year’) who terrorised a village and was beaten by firecrackers and red by wearing red and throwing firework shows. Grandmas tut at you for wearing anything ‘too light’ or ‘too dark’, homes fill with bright flowers and tangerine bushes that are reminiscent of Chinese gold ingots.
Families visit temples and give offerings for a good year, and stack food at ancestral altars. Shops offer you some variation of 8% off (8 sounds like ‘wealth’ or ‘prosperity’), and you spend your days eating various grandmas’ and aunts’ cooking until you’re stuffed full.
Traditions across Asia
That being said, NY traditions vary across Asia. In Vietnam, Tết also involves the celebration of teachers, with students bringing gifts of fruits and food. Taiwan eats pineapple cakes because they sound like “good fortune” in Hokkien. Young Koreans perform 세배 (sebae), a traditional bow along with a fortune blessing for a white envelope or a silk bag with money. In fact, countries like Mongolia and Tibet don’t follow the same calendar but their own local variations of a Uyghur lunisolar calendar, so their new year sometimes starts later in March.
Through all these traditions, core tenets remain. It’s a massive celebration welcoming in everything bright, prosperous, and new with all your loved ones.
I wish you all a prosperous New Year, filled with many new beginnings. How will you celebrate?