Celebrating Chinese New Year

Starting this week we celebrate "The Year of the Sheep" and a two week long Chinese New Year  celebration. With chilling temperatures and winter storms sweeping the country, it's hard to imagine that spring is in our sights or that anyone would want to celebrate a New Year.

However, since our lives were spent living in Beijing, China for one year, we give tribute to our memories and celebrate with our friends in spirit.  I do recall so fondly our first spring Chinese New Year celebration in China, It was so delightful to see everyone so happy.

The culture of the Chinese people is very family oriented. The adult children leave their parents and start their own families and then they leave their new babies with their parents to work. The Chinese people work so very hard and such brutal along hours, for very little pay and sometimes very far from their children and their parents.

During the two week long Chinese New Year celebration, many of the residents who work in Beijing take the long journey to their home towns, where their parents reside and where their children are. Can you imagine only seeing your children for a few weeks out of the year.

We've been celebrating Chinese New Year this week and remembering all our old friends!

In the Chinese New Year tradition, I've been giving my children  Mandarin oranges for luck and  lucky red envelope to ward off evil spirits! If you don't know anything about the "red envelopes", here is a bit of background. The red envelopes, known as  'hóngbāo', can be filled with everything from a couple of dollars to a few thousand yen. It is popular to give $8, which is considered very lucky in Chinese tradition.