Yesterday on New Year's Eve, I started the day with making some decorations. Typical colors are red and gold for the Chinese New Year, because the colors symbolize love and prosperity. I bought some DIY paper flowers in Taipei and put them on some branches and also added some red envelopes for luck and fortune. We also went to purchase a satsuma plant. The pronouciation for satsumas in Chinese (as well as many other things) has a nice meaning so superstitious people believe that if you eat something for example satsumas it'll bring you wealth. I'm not superstitious but the decorations are nice to look at and it's fun with traditions.
In 2012 it is the year of the Dragon. There are twelve different animals in the Chinese zodiac. I was born in the Dragon's year so I think'll be a great year! It says that dragons are lucky, confident, generous and brave. We had some fruit called lóng yǎn which literally means dragon eyes because longan is white inside and a round black seed.
The food we cooked for lunch (sea food hot pot, woked udon noodles, pork steak and shitake mushroom woked with abalone) were put by an altar together with chopsticks and soup spoons. We all lighted an inscense to pray for our ancestors. This is an symbolic action to treat them a meal and for reminiscense.
In the afternoon we painted some lanterns and wrote wishes on them. There are many traditional greetings to wish people luck in school and work, in relationships and health. I wrote "新年快樂, 心想事成!" on mine which means "Happy new year, heart thoughts come true!".
In the evening, we cooked a lot of good and traditional dishes. This time we pray for people who are alone. We also put tea leaves and some liquor on the table to treat them a drink.
On the menu was:
- Roasted duck
- Sauted asparagus with garlic topping
- Woked Noodles
- Abalone wok with paksoi shitake mushroom
- Flamed shrimps
- Seafood wok
- Fried pork dumplings wrapped in soy paper
- Taro purée with glazed sweet potato amd red dates for dessert.
After the dinner we lightened our lanterns. The picture below left shows one of our lanterns with a dragon and wish for studies development. Only one out of three were successfully released (it was a little bit too windy for lanters). That one flew way high up in the sky and looked like a star after a few seconds. We played games and mah jong for the rest of the evening and had a good time. Before we went to bed we left a lamp turned on the whole night through (it was a low energy bulb), as light is a good sign.
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