Chinese New Year falls on January 31st and this year it is the year of the horse. Celebrating Chinese New Year is a great insight into another culture and a good excuse to spend time with family and old friends. So if you are thinking of throwing a party to celebrate we thought we would bring you some key practices to ensure you celebrate this very traditional holiday correctly.
A very significant holiday within Chinese culture, the festivities last for two weeks and it is a time to prepare your home to allow good luck to enter.
The most important act of preparation for Chinese New Year is to thoroughly clean your home! Now whilst this might not sound very interesting to many of you, it is a key tradition founded in the belief that you must sweep away all of the bad luck accumulated within your home over the year in order to prepare the house for good luck to begin flowing in again.
However, you must not clean your home during the new year! So make sure it all done by the 31st! The clean during the period of festivities is believed to 'sweep' away all the good luck which has just arrived. So over the two week period following the new year, you are not allowed to pick up a dust cloth, broom or mop at all. We're sure it sounds more enticing now...
The next important act to prepare for this festival is to decorate your home appropriately! Red is a key colour in Chinese culture as it symbolises good luck, so be sure to use plenty of red balloons, streamers and bunting to decorate your home. Equally, gold is a colour long associated with Chinese New Year as it represents wealth. Something I am sure we all want to encourage to enter our homes in the coming year! Flingers has plenty of red and gold coloured decorations perfect for this time of year. If you are stuck for ideas on how to create decorations, pick up some red and golden yellow streamers and check out our recent tutorial on how to decorate with party streamers for some great ideas and tips.
Other decorations which are important to place around your home include lotus flowers, mandarins and candles. But ensure you use equal amounts of everything as uneven numbers bring unhappiness!
The evening before the New Year begins is the time to get your family and friends to sit down and have a big traditional Chinese meal. This is the perfect time to wear any traditional chinese clothes you have. Again, red and gold are the best colours to chose when picking out your outfit. Avoid wearing too much black as this symbolises bad luck and even death!
If you don't have any chinese traditional clothing to wear, pop along to Flingers for some lighthearted chinese costume hats and wigs to get you into the spirit of the holiday!
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| Black & Yellow Mandarin Hat | Oriental Wig | Red Chinese Mandarin Hat |
Will you be celebrating Chinese New Year?
