Chinese New Year

This year was our second time to experience Chinese New Year in Hong Kong so we thought we would share some of our experiences with you.

For a little background information, Chinese New Year,also known as the Spring Festival in modern China, is an important Chinese festival celebrated at the turn of the traditional lunisolar Chinese calendar.  Celebrations traditionally run from the evening preceding the first day, to the Lantern Festival on the 15th day of the first calendar month. The first day of the New Year falls on the new moon between January 21 and February 20.  In 2018, the first day of the Lunar New Year was on Friday, 16 February, initiating the year of the Dog.
Often, the evening preceding Lunar New Year's Day is an occasion for Chinese families to gather for the annual reunion dinner. It is also traditional for every family to thoroughly clean the house, in order to sweep away any ill-fortune and to make way for incoming good luck. Windows and doors are decorated with red colour paper-cuts and couplets with popular themes of "good fortune" or "happiness", "wealth", and "longevity". Other activities include lighting firecrackers and giving money in red paper envelopes called Lai See.

          2018 - The Year of the Dog

Many of the Buildings showed electronic displays for New Years.

Orange Trees, a decoration for New Years, in front of the lobby to our Hotel.

A tree in the lobby of our Hotel decorated with Lie See Envelopes.  The tree was alive and you can see blossoms starting to come out.  We put money in Lai See Envelopes and gave them to some of the security guards at the hotel, some of the bus drivers and a few others.


There are several greeting spoken this time of year.  Below Sister Sorensen is wishing everyone, "Happiness and Prosperity".

For Family Home Evening with the Area Missionaries, Elder and Sister Yan had us prepare and eat a traditional Hot Pot Chinese New Year meal with the ingredients shown above.

Each person would put his own ingredients from the above picture into this pot of boiling water to cook.  Everyone was given two sets of chopsticks, one to put the food into and out of the pot and the other set to eat with.  Yes, we all ate with chopsticks, some doing better than others.


DRAGON DANCE

The dragon dance is often performed during Chinese New Year. Chinese dragons are a symbol of China's culture, and they are believed to bring good luck to people, therefore the longer the dragon in the dance, the more luck it will bring to the community. The dragons are believed to possess qualities that include great power, dignity, fertility, wisdom and auspiciousness.  The dance team simulates the imagined movements of this river spirit in a sinuous, undulating manner.

The following video shows an attempt by the Senior Missionaries at Family Home Evening to perform the Dragon Dance.  Feel free to use your imagination as to what a real dragon dance should look like.

Many stores featured decorations to be purchased to celebrate the new year.

Elder and Sister Sorensen looking down on one of the streets where vendors set up booths to sell their wares.  During Chinese New Year you can find items only available this time of year.

Flowers are a big part of New Years with many buying flowers to have in their homes this time of year.  Here is Flower Street where there are many flower shops year round but during New Years flowers were not only in the shops but in the streets as well.

Just one small part of the street selling flowers.

Small orange trees for sale.

Your guess is as good as ours as to what these are but we saw them for sale everywhere and only at New Years.

 The following pictures show some of the many varieties of flowers we saw.  It was fun to walk around and just look at the flowers for sale.

These are live bamboo shoots tied together to form a decoration.

Victoria Park on Hong Kong Island was set up with many rows of booths for vendors to sell from.  We went there for a few hours just to get a feeling for what it was like.

Just one of  the walkways with booths on both sides.

A different area of Victoria Park, same feeling with all the people.


Below is a video in Victoria Park doing a 360 in one of the walkways.  Hope you don't get dizzy watching it.




Fireworks

A fireworks display is a tradition for Chinese New Years.  The fireworks display is set off from barges in Victoria Bay.  We had been invited along with others to watch the display from the apartment of one of the area missionaries who has a great view.  The below video shows 45 seconds of a display that went on for over 25 minutes.  This display was last year but we wanted you to see what fireworks look like in Hong Kong.  (Note: The fireworks were cancelled this year because just before New Years a double decker bus turned over in Tai Po killing 19 and injuring over 65 more.  Because of the tragedy they didn't think it was appropriate to have the fire works display.)