Stuart speculates that older relatives may give these envelopes to each other digitally during the pandemic. In this tradition, older relatives give young children bright red envelopes filled with cash, which originates from a custom where people swapped coins to ward off evil spirits. To show your appreciation for a safe passage for the previous year.”Īnother Lunar New Year custom involves exchanging red envelopes. “The ways of honoring the ancestors may be slightly different throughout China, but the basic idea is that you’re going to hang up paintings of your ancestors or display photographs of them and make offerings of incense and food.”Ĭhen agrees, “It’s important for you to pay tribute to your ancestors. “You prepare to honor your family ancestors, and people do this today as well,” says Stuart. It’s kicked off with a reunion dinner with your family on New Year’s Eve and concludes with the lantern festival.”ĭuring Lunar New Year revelries, families make offerings to their ancestors, which are usually accompanied by an ancestral shrine. “It’s a family-oriented holiday,” says YinYing Chen, a program staffer at the Freer and Sackler Galleries who grew up in Taiwan. One food that people eat during the Lunar New Year is tangyuan(glutinous rice ball), which is a sweet rice patty that people typically eat during the lantern festival, the culminating celebration of the Lunar New Year. The meal allows for relatives who haven’t seen each other in months to dine together and celebrate the arrival of spring. Many traditions are associated with the new year, including a large reunion dinner with one’s family. She adds that the Lunar New Year is based on, “this idea of starting fresh and anew.” You start by doing certain ritual acts, such as a symbolic sweeping cleaning of the home in order to drive out any misfortune, bad luck or any bad influences,” says Stuart. In the People’s Republic of China, the public holiday is one week long, and this year it will take place between February 11 and 17. The Lunar New Year took place after farmers harvested crops and before they had to plant new ones, so the holiday represents a time of rest. Traditional China was largely an agrarian society. The Chinese calendar has been micro calibrated to be best for agricultural dates.” “There are mechanisms keeping these calendars in sync, but it’s the lunar calendar that’s the primary one. In a lunisolar calendar, there are certain things that are also pegged to the movement of the sun, says Jan Stuart, a curator at the Freer and Sackler Galleries, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art. This means that Lunar New Year festivities fall on a different day each year. However, lunar calendars don’t always correspond with the seasons so to remedy that an extra month is sometimes added to a lunar calendar to align it with a solar calendar. Many ancient calendars such as the Chinese, Hindu and Jewish ones are based on these moon cycles. Though it takes 365 days for the Earth to orbit the sun, the moon’s 12 full cycles take about 354 days to complete. However, the Lunar New Year is based on a lunisolar calendar that matches the cycles of the moon. The dates of the New Year change every year on the Gregorian calendar, the solar dating system used in most of the world. The Lunar New Year-which is also called Spring Festival-marks the first full moon of the lunar calendar and generally takes place between January 21 and February 20. Here’s more information on the Lunar New Year and how you can celebrate at home in 2021. Similarly, in the United States, government officials continue to ask people to practice social distancing and to restrict travel.Īs a result, many families are homebound for this year’s Lunar New Year festivities, so the Smithsonian American Art Museum is partnering with the Freer and Sackler Galleries to host a series of virtual events to kick off the new year. Every year, millions of people usually travel to see their families ahead of the Lunar New Year, one of the most important holidays celebrated in Vietnam, South Korea, China, other Asian countries and the diaspora.īut this year, the Covid-19 pandemic has made travel difficult: The Chinese government has urged families to limit “nonessential” trips to prevent the spread of Covid-19.
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