Many of my friends take the Chinese New Year public holidays as an opportunity for a much-needed break. They flew to places where they aren’t inundated with pineapple tarts and love letters and gratuitous eating everywhere they turn. I missed many of my cousins last year, as they had gone on holiday to enjoy respite from the boiling hot days. By Christmas, they had already booked their flights and packages. I’m one of the few that really enjoy the rituals and traditions of this festival, and this makes me feel old, like I’m someone of my parents’ generation.
I love that the Chinese New Year celebrates renewal and change, a breaking from the old cycle and the breaking into the new one. We turn over a new leaf to find a beautifully blank page to fill with all our new hopes, dreams and desires. I even love the ritual of spring-cleaning, out with the old and in with the new! It gives me such a clean feeling to see bags of stuff unsentimentally chucked into enormous designer paper bags. It’s an excuse for me to dawdle over things that I have accumulated over the last year: Before tossing them out after five minutes - dramatically. Try it, it’s therapeutic.
Another thing I love doing: Filling my home with cut flowers. The highlight: The magical day when the unpromising little bumps on the brown branches of the Forsythia blossom into a joyous conflagration – this fills me with delight. You go to sleep after reunion dinner and the branches are dead-seeming and dull, but you wake up the next morning to auspicious, glorious, riotous clouds of yellow! I love going to the wholesale nurseries at Thomson Road to order orange trees and plants, I love the just-washed sofa covers and carpets. I love that the normally sloppy make the effort for Chinese New Year: The men with their new haircuts look spiffy and the women wearing all their jewellery. Of course I love the new clothes in bright colours. There’s a certain back-to-school feeling about it all, and shopping for new New Year clothes makes me nostalgic for all those days when Mother took me shopping to kit me out for school: New pencil case, pens, mini, ruler, eraser, bright-white school shoes. All my life, I’ve had new pyjamas, underwear, shoes, shirts, sheets, towels, everything, to see the new year in in.
Best of all, Chinese New Year presents a second chance to make good on the resolutions you failed to keep. It’s a second chance at a new beginning, and that’s something to celebrate, surely?
I love that the Chinese New Year celebrates renewal and change, a breaking from the old cycle and the breaking into the new one. We turn over a new leaf to find a beautifully blank page to fill with all our new hopes, dreams and desires. I even love the ritual of spring-cleaning, out with the old and in with the new! It gives me such a clean feeling to see bags of stuff unsentimentally chucked into enormous designer paper bags. It’s an excuse for me to dawdle over things that I have accumulated over the last year: Before tossing them out after five minutes - dramatically. Try it, it’s therapeutic.
Another thing I love doing: Filling my home with cut flowers. The highlight: The magical day when the unpromising little bumps on the brown branches of the Forsythia blossom into a joyous conflagration – this fills me with delight. You go to sleep after reunion dinner and the branches are dead-seeming and dull, but you wake up the next morning to auspicious, glorious, riotous clouds of yellow! I love going to the wholesale nurseries at Thomson Road to order orange trees and plants, I love the just-washed sofa covers and carpets. I love that the normally sloppy make the effort for Chinese New Year: The men with their new haircuts look spiffy and the women wearing all their jewellery. Of course I love the new clothes in bright colours. There’s a certain back-to-school feeling about it all, and shopping for new New Year clothes makes me nostalgic for all those days when Mother took me shopping to kit me out for school: New pencil case, pens, mini, ruler, eraser, bright-white school shoes. All my life, I’ve had new pyjamas, underwear, shoes, shirts, sheets, towels, everything, to see the new year in in.
Best of all, Chinese New Year presents a second chance to make good on the resolutions you failed to keep. It’s a second chance at a new beginning, and that’s something to celebrate, surely?
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