CELEBRATING CHINESE NEW YEAR AMERICAN STYLE

Tonight we had family over to celebrate Chinese New Year. We ordered Chinese take-out and pizza for our festive New Year dinner. Our neice, Lauren, tried Chinese for the first time and really liked it. See what culture Malia is bringing to our family already?

After dinner, we passed out fortune cookies. My very talented Mother-In-Law made her own fortune cookies for everyone.

Aren't they awesome?!? She used felt for the cookies with some pipecleaners inside to help shape them, and she even made forturnes to go inside! Here's her favorite: The other night I laid in bed looking up at the stars and I thought to myself, "Where the heck is the roof?"

After dinner Rick and I took a few minutes to read and explain a little bit about how the Chinese celebrate their New Year. We shared how they begin by thoroughly cleaning their homes to "sweep out" the bad luck, how they gather together with family and eat elaborate meals (much like our Thanksgiving celebration), how at the stroke of midnight everyone turns a year older at the same time (called "yan yat", which means "Everybody's Birthday"), and then we passed out the red envelopes with gold dollar coins to all the kids.

After this little lesson, we gathered in our dining room to talk about our "family memorial table". Since a big part of Chinese culture is ancestor worship, they make a big deal out of building altars for their deceased relatives. The Chinese believe that deceased ancestors watch over them much like our Western culture believes in guardian angels. This makes sense, then, why they honor these relatives so much. To begin their time of ancestor worship, they bang a gong several times to get the attention of their deceased relatives' spirits. Then they bow three times and say prayers to them. There are many things they put on the table along with the pictures of their loved ones, including burning incense, two red candles set on either side of the pictures to represent the sun and the moom (important Chinese symbols), a bowl of rice with chopsticks standing up, sweet candies, and even some of their relatives' favorite foods.

Since we believe in only worshiping God, we decided to include this Chinese tradition by tweaking it to include memorializing our deceased relatives rather than worshiping them. We definitely don't have all the pictures we want on our table this year, but we'll be working on that to have them for next year. We also have fresh flowers on our table. Fresh flowers represent new beginnings to the Chinese. Before leaving for the evening, we offered to our families to take a flower home with them.

For my birthday last year, my Father-In-Law got me an Asian-looking windchime. We decided to hang this in the doorway for the evening. And, since it had a small gong-like piece, we used it to bang the gong to wake everyone up since I seemed to have bored them to death with all my teaching (haha). Here's Luke helping Rick bang the gong.

After all the ceremonial stuff, we sat down to play some Catch Phrase and managed to laugh so hard we cried.

We had a great evening and can't wait to learn about more of the Chinese holidays and see how we can incorporate them into our family. But, more than that, we can't wait to celebrate having Malia home with us! Gung Hay Fat Choy, little one!