Lunar New Year: The Decorations

The Lunar New Year is officially over, but we still have the rest of the week off. Before getting back to regular posting, I’m going to share with you a few (read: a lot) photos of the New Year. First up is the decorations. There are two things that can’t be absent in a home during Lunar New Year: a branch of peach tree blossoms (in the northern part; in the South people prefer a yellow-flowered tree called Ochna, or “mai” in Vietnamese) and a kumquat tree.  We also decorate with a lot of fresh flowers, both inside the house and outside.

Of course, that means that the flower market was always crowded the day before New Year’s Eve.

People sometimes also hang up traditional woodcut paintings and calligraphy prints, but our family have our own tradition: a collage of that year’s zodiac sign – which this year is a snake – that we made from scraps of magazines and colored paper. We started making them when I was in first grade; we have all 12 animals now, so instead of making new ones, we just add to the old paintings pictures of some “events” that happened in our family during the previous year – like my niece’s third birthday, for example. Making these collages on New Year’s Eve is a fun little ritual that we have.

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