Xin Nian Kwai Le!

Xin Nian Kwai Le! Happy Chinese New Year! This is a couple days late since Chinese New Year was on Monday. This is the year of the Ox, which is known to be hardworking and prosperous. While the official holiday was on January 26th this year, the celebration lasts about a week. Millions of Chinese people travel home to be with family because it is considered the most important holiday of the year. The traditional belief is that the new year brings good fortune. A major part of the celebration is eating a fancy meal of foods that symbolize good fortune, prosperity, and long life.

Our family celebrated by eating dumplings, rice, and stir-fried bok choy with garlic and shiitake mushrooms. The dumplings represent gold nuggets and the rice is for good fortune. The day before the holiday, people usually clean their homes from top to bottom, symbolizing sweeping away bad luck or ill will from the past year. You're not supposed to clean on the holiday itself as you wouldn't want to sweep away any good fortune that might have arrived. Not being superstitious, and since the day before was the Sabbath, I did do some cleaning on the first day of the new year.

Our little celebration was quite modest compared to how you're really supposed to do it. Here's a link to some beautiful pictures of people celebrating Chinese New Year around the world.

By the way, I have another blog devoted to something I enjoy very much: food! It's called Cheyenne Foods and the url is http://cheyennefoods.blogspot.com. I will be sharing recipes and food thoughts there.