New Year's Eve is the day for people to eat, drink, entertain and enjoy themselves. To celebrate the New Year, the northerners have 'jiaozi' and the southerners make 'niangao' (New Year cakes). 'Jiaozi' is shaped like shoe-shaped gold or silver ingot, used as money in feudal China, while the Chinese characters 'niangao' is the homophone of 'High Year', meaning getting better year by year". So both 'jiaozi' and 'niangao' are good .
On New Year's Eve , all the family sit round the table, enjoying the "New Year's Eve dinner", representing a happy family reunion. At dinner, the fish must not be eaten, for the Chinese character fish is the homophone of "surplus", meaning we have surplus fortune every year. So 'fish' symbols the 'luck and wealth' of the coming year. Fish on the dinner table is not a dish, but a decoration for the sake of good luck and fortune.
Celebrated ActivitiesTo pay a New Year visit is an important event during the Spring Festival. In olden times, high-ranking officials would go to the court to wish the emperor a Happy New Year. The entire clan would hold a ceremony. However, the most frequent visits were those between relatives and friends. This activity would continue for several days.
Beginning in the Song Dynasty in the tenth century,people began to send cards to express a New Year's greeting. At first, the sending of New Year's cards was limited to the circle of people in high positions. So it was also a way to show off one's social status. However, at the beginning of the Ming Dynasty in the 14th century, ordinary people also began to exchange cards. The practice continues today during the Spring Festival.
As for recreational activities duning the Sping Festival, we can use two words to summar-ize:various and colorful. The Dragon Dance and Lion Dance are traditionally performed during the festival. The dances do not have to be performed during the festival. The dances do not have to be performed by professionals. Sometimes the perfomers are famers, street vendors or craftsmen.
Walking on stilts is another traditional perfomance-event popular in China, especially in the northern part of the country. According to the archives,our Chinese ancestors began using stilts to help them gather fruits from trees. This practical use of stilts gradually developed into a kind of folk dance. Today's skillful perfomers can perform truly amazing feats and extremely difficult movements on stilts .The professionals even put on dramas while walking about on stilts.
If you are not a stilt-walker yourself, or can not do a dragon or lion dance, never mind! During Spring Fesstival time, you can go to temple fairs and enjoy superbperformances of the dances, stilt-walking and amazing acrobatic shows. You can also try and enjoy the many varieties of local snack foods.
Nowadays, most people in China's rural areas still hold to these traditional celebrations, However, as the bace of life continues to quicken in the cities, urban residents have taken up new ways to celebrate the Chinese traditional New Year. For example, many city dwellers no longer bother to send out greeting cards. Instead, they use the telephone or pagers to convey greetings to relatives and friends.To travel during the New Year holidays is another fashionable trend.And whatshould be mentioned, too, is that for safety reason, firecrackers were banned in some large cities of China a few years ago, making the occasion much quieter than before.
It seems that all our traditions are facing new challenges. Maybe when the children of the next generation grow up, they can only leam about Chinese traditions from books.