Chinese New Year

Chinese New Year, which is on the 3rd of February this year, passed a few weeks ago already. I am sharing with all of you my wonderful and special encounter this year.

Every year, to us, Chinese, we will celebrate the Lunar New Year. The Chinese New Year will be the festive period where all the shops in Singapore experience a boom in their businesses and food delivery and catering companies finding a sudden hike in orders from customers. Many preparations will be carried out before celebrating the Chinese New Year. Preparations such as packing up the mess in the house which was created during the previous year, clean up the house, getting new clothes and most importantly, for the adults – making a visit to the bank.

My family, however, is slightly different. We will pack up the house and dispose the unwanted stuff and old furniture two months before Chinese New Year, while the typical Chinese family in Singapore usually will start only a few weeks before the week the day of the New Year. We will then clean the house regularly, once every two days until the eve of the Lunar New Year. In my family, as I am already secondary two, my parents took this reason for me to clean up my room and my sister’s room. My “kiasu” parents will not waste any time as I lighten their burden. They will beat everybody else and get to the bank and draw out a huge amount of money for the red packets they will be giving out during the fifteen days of the festive period.
After all the tiring preparations, the day we had all been anxiously waiting for, and the day the adults, including my parents, are dreading have finally got closer by one day. It was the eve of the Chinese New Year, this is the day when the whole family sits down together and have a meal. But usually, for typical Singaporean Chinese, and what my family have been doing for the past few years, we will have steamboat. However, on the eve, my father decided to bring us to East Coast Beach for BBQ dinner instead. The fun did not end after the BBQ session, in continued throughout the subsequent fifteen days. On the eve, we were all allowed to stay up to as late as midnight as it is a Chinese tradition for children to stay up to the wee hours on the eve as it is an act of filial piety to our parents.

On the first day of the Lunar New Year, we went to Mandai columbarium first thing in the morning to pay respects to my late relatives. After that it was a marathon of house visiting. At night, although my jaw was aching from giving festive wishes and legs pain from walking to and fro the car, my pocket was already bulging with red packets. The second day of Chinese New Year was the day which made this year’s Chinese New Year special to my family. Our Indian neighbours who just moved in recently and migrated to Singapore paid a visit to us! We had so much fun as we taught our Indian neighbours our Chinese culture and let them taste the Chinese new year goodies. When my parents gave the Indian children red packets, they taught that my parents had given them a letter and the red packet was a fanciful envelope. We had two hours of fun interacting with our new neighbours and my parents promised them that we would visit them during Deepavali also!

This year’s Chinese New Year is one that would be etched in my memory for quite some time. I hope that you had a good Chinese New Year also!