FoodMayhem

Chinese New Year celebrations start tomorrow night and lasts for days. Even if you’re not Chinese, you can celebrate as well. Here’s a brief outline. Pick and choose the things you’d like to do and modify as you wish. Hey, I celebrate Break Fast but I don’t fast.

1. New Year’s Eve dinner is Wed night this year, on February 6th. Everyone scrambles home to be with their family, usually going to wherever their elders are. So, if you can, go have dinner with your parents and/or grandparents.

2. The New Year’s Eve meal is supposed to include a wide variety of dishes: a chicken, a duck, a fish, a meat (beef, lamb, or pork), and as many of each as possible. You can order in or make reservations at a restaurant to make things easy.

3. Right before midnight on Wed night, eat dumplings. Dumplings are similar in shape to an old form of Chinese money or gold ingots called Yuan Bao and so dumplings are symbolic. You can also fold Yuan Bao shapes with paper.

4. Make sure you have plenty of left-over fish from Wednesday night’s dinner. The word fish in Chinese symbolizes abundance so you want to have plenty flowing into the next year.

5. Starting on Thursday, New Year’s Day, people start visiting everyone they know and eating with different people. This lasts for days, up to two weeks. Usually, you visit in order of how close people are to you and elders get priority, as always. I am clearly going to take advantage of this concept!

6. If you’re not into cooking, I’ve got an excuse for you. Traditionally, people will cook a lot of food and stock up for the days leading up to the new year. Once, it’s Thurs, you don’t cook anymore for days. It is considered a time of rest and celebration.