Lantern Festival – 元宵節 – Yuán xiāo jié

Lantern Festival or 元宵節 is celebrated on the 15th day of the first month in the lunar calendar. This is not to be confused with Moon Festival, which is celebrated on the 15th day of the eighth month in the lunar calendar. Traditioanlly, 元宵節 marks the end of the Chinese New Year celebration as it’s the first full moon of the new year. Once again, families gather together for one last time before returning to work and “normal” life. During the gathering, everyone is to enjoy some 湯圓, tāng yuán, made out of glutinous rice. As you have seen from our previous posts, Chinese people believe in symbolic food, the circular shape of the tang yuan reminds family members to stay together and be united. So don’t forget to eat your tang yuan on 2/28 this year!

For the first time, there is a DS games based on the popular kids show Ni Hao Kai-lan. Based on Nickelodeon’s educational entertainment television series for preschoolers and designed for the youngest of gamers, Ni Hao, Kai-lan: New Year’s Celebration is a collection of easy-to-play mini-games featuring six-year-old Kai-lan and her young animal friends, Rintoo the tiger, Tolee the koala, Hoho the monkey, and Grandpa YeYe.

The games, developed by 2KPlay, (given to us to try) involove gentle and engaging activities such as cooking Chinese dumpling, making almond cookies, and marching in parades. This game is designed with young gamers in mind, (3-5 years old), so it’s relatively easy for them to play independently. I only had to show my 4 year old once before he got the gist of the steps. In addition, the game also provides encouraging hints whenever help is needed. My 4 year old was so happy there is a game for him on the DS. He has already asked for one for himself!

While this game is designed for preschoolers, my 7 year old also enjoyed playing the game. It also provided him something common to share with his little brother. It was cute to watch the two of them huddled over the screen while coloring, and clicking through the shapes. According to them, their favorite activity was cooking dumplings as they both love to eat dumplings!

Many of you know I fly often with my boys to visit  families in California. I’m so looking forward to bringing this game with us on our next trip. Anything to contain 3 boys on a 6 hour flight is a lifesaver in my opinion! Oh yeah, it offers some Chinese culture  and words they can buff up with before seeing my parents!

Ni Hao Kai-lan: New Year’s Celebraion game is available at retailers nationwide including Toys R Us and Target.

Happy New Year Everyone!

We took a week off, following the traditions and to fight all the evil spirits and not wanting to bring any bad luck.  Right!  Actually, kids were off last week, and combined with all the snow and Chinese New Year celebrations, we were too exhausted to blog.  

During the week off, I ate a lot of gāo.  The literally translation is cake, but most gāo that I ate was not the sweet ones that most people are accustomed to.  Chinese people eat these gāo a lot during Chinese New Year.  The word cake, or gāo, sounds the same as the word “High” or 高.  Therefore, eating a lot of gāo has a symbolic meaning of raising oneself higher.

Some of the 糕 gāo our family likes to eat during Chinese New Year are:

• Radish Cake – 蘿蔔糕 – This is not a sweet kind of cake, and a lot of dim sum places have them on a regular basis too.  It is delicious and it is usually cut into rectangular pieces and pan fried before serving.  My boys love them!  I found this recipe from Tasty Treats, check it out.
• Sticky Rice Cake – 年糕 – This literally means year cake, and my parents only make them during Chinese New Year.  Wemake the Cantonese version, which is sweetened with brown sugar.  It is also pan fried before serving.  My Dad makes a really good one, I will have to make sure I put that into my family recipe blog.
• Taro Cake – 芋頭糕 – Very similar to radish cake, except the change of taro instead of radish.  It offers a different texture than the radish cake, slightly denser.  Here’s a good recipe from Chow Times.

It’s a snow day here in NJ today, actually, it’s more like a blizzard day.  I was supposed to present Chinese New Year to two kindergarten classes today, but I guess that’s not happening.  Well, here’s the craft I was going to have the class made.  It’s a very cute dragon, and the boys definitely enjoyed making them.  Chinese people see dragons as power and goodness, and Dragon dance symbolizes the bringing of good luck and success in the coming year.

I found the craft from Oriental Trading.  The only warning is that there is a lot of pre-assembling work, especially for my 5 year old class.  I spent a few hours putting the ribbon through the hole and pre-packaging the pieces together.  I do love the result though, so it is worth it!

Have fun!

Good Fortune – 福 – fú

The Fú Character may be one of the most popular Chinese New Year symbols for modern Chinese people. The Chinese character Fú means fortune.

It can be posted either in normal position or upside down like in the above picture. Why post it upside down? In Chinese language, the character “upside down” is pronounced exactly the same as the character “arrive”. So this is a homophone rhetoric to mean “Fortune arrives”.

Reunion Dinner – 團圓飯 – tuán yuán fan

This literally means “Reunion Rice”, it is the big dinner Chinese  people eat on New Year’s Eve.  It is considered one of the most important events for Chinese New Year.  It is translated as Reunion Meal, as all the family members would make a special effort to make this dinner, so that the family is once again united before the New Year.  It is a symbol of strength and unity of the family.

As mentioned from my previous post, I have a big family.  Even now that I am married, I still make a point to go back to my parent’s house for this dinner.  This becomes a juggling art, as we will also need to have dinner with my in-laws as well.  We will usually have an extra early dinner with my in-laws, then head to my parent’s house for a second meal,  and then a sleepover.  This is definitely the beauty and the difficulty of having all family members relatively close by.  I am sure this doesn’t sound all that unfamiliar with most of you, as Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners are probably handled in a similar manner.  It’s crazy, but it is all good time.

I am doing a presentation for two kindergarten classes next week for Chinese New Year.  I ended up making a Power Point slide with a lion dance movie embedded in it.  It’s very cool, if I must say so myself.  The school has smart boards so that I can just operate the power point presentation right on the big screen.  This is my first year with public school since my time, so I am easily excited.

Anyway, I found that I ended up talking about food a lot.  Just like most everything I write here, it always somehow goes back to eating and food.  I thought I’d share with you on some of the most popular symbolic food that we eat for our Reunion Dinner on New Year’s Eve.

1.  Scallops – because they look like ancient Chinese coins

2.  Whole Chicken – symbolizes happiness and marriages

3.  Whole Fish – because the Chinese word for fish (yu) sounds similar to the word “plenty”, and that you must not eat the whole fish so that you will have leftovers.

4.  Long Noodles – their length represents long life.

5.  Steamed Dumplings – because they look like the shape of traditional Chinese gold ingots.

6.  Nian Gao (Sweet Sticky Rice Cake) – because its pronunciation is a homophone for a “a more prosperous year”

Doesn’t this make your mouth water?  Happy New Year!

For centuries, Asian people have celebrated the New Year by gifting money to friends and family as a way to wish them peace and happiness for the coming year. While this money-giving tradition typically happens in person, a new free service from PayPal partner Lottay.com enables people physically separated by location to wish friends and family a Happy New Year with a virtual hong bao (red envelope) filled with real money and/or a personal message.

Here’s how it works:

1. Go to: http://www.lottay.com/lunar_new_year
2. Input the friend’s or family member’s name and email address.
3. Easily customize the hong bao with graphics, personal message and dollar amount (if desired).
4. Press ‘Send’ and the virtual hong bao will be delivered instantly via email to your loved one.

If a person is sending money with the hong bao, Lottay.com allows him/her to use their PayPal account to securely gift money to their friends and family. Once the monetary gift is sent, the recipient will be notified that they were given a cash gift along with their hong bao.

Happy Chinese New Year!

Growing up in Hong Kong, Chinese New Year means 2 weeks without school, lots of food, lots of visiting relatives, and new clothes.  It was my favorite holiday growing up, and it is still a very big holiday in my heart.  I try to pass on the tradition, and how fun Chinese New Year could be with the boys.  To make a point, when I was still working my 9-5 job (more like 7-5), I would always take a vacation day for Chinese New Year.  Hey, it is important, and I do feel that I need to set that example for the boys.

Anyway, I have such fond memories of the New Year.  My mom would start planning the meal a few weeks in advance.  I guess not that much different than planning Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner.  Our home would be cleaned from top to bottom.  In our tradition, the big cleaning should be done on the 28th of December (lunar calendar).  I always got so motivated that I definitely did my big share of cleaning.  It is believed that you should clean the house to sweep away all the bad luck before the New Year begins, so that it doesn’t carry on till the following year.

Then we would decorate our house by hanging red papers with good luck writings on them.  Remember the story of Nien from previous posting, this mythical monster was afraid of anything red.

We will then eat with our whole family on New Year’s eve.  I have 4 sisters, and 1 brother, so we always had to find space for this big dinner in our little Hong Kong apartment.  This dinner is called “reunion dinner”, or 团 圆 饭, tuan yuan fan.  It is a tradition that everyone should try VERY hard to make it to dinner.  Usually there are 8 or 9 dishes, which is another topic for another day, and usually consist of chicken, pork, fish, black moss, and some other shell fish.  We will then have to clean up and sweep again before midnight, otherwise my mom restricted anyone to sweep our house until the 3rd day of New Year.

Then on New Year’s day, our parents would give out red envelopes to us, and we will say our Happy New Year to them.  It is a tradition that only married couples give away red envelope to children.  I remember opening the red envelopes at the end of day to count the money I “made” everyday, and would do a total tally to see if I did well that year.

After New Year’s day, then we would travel to go see our relatives, or they would come over to our house to see us.  I have a very big family.  My dad is one of seven kids, and my mom is one of six, so we had lots of visiting to do.  We would bring candy or chocolate.  The tradition is that you need to bring something sweet, to wash away any bitterness from last year.

Oh boy, so busy and so much fun, and therefore Chinese people celebrate New Year for 15 days.

In the past few months, we’ve heard from many of you out there regarding our website and our offerings. Most of them were congratulatory, and it made us feel really good about what we’ve been able to accompolish in the short time since we launched our business. The feedbacks have also been very positive, and the products are well received acrossed the board.

To further our goal to provide high quality educational material that are also relavent to our customer, we’ve added some new items to our website. The biggest change is that we now have a Simplified Chinese section, for those of you who wish to teach your children simplified version of the written language. We realize this is a continued debate within the Chinese community, and proponents of both have made convincing arguments. I think adding this catagory really helps us to round up the needs of our customers. We are also fortunate enough to find high quality paperbacks in both Simplifed Chinese and English, such as Harold and the Purple Crayon, Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?, Little Pip and the Rainbow Wish. So be sure to check out these and many other titles, your children will love to read or hear these stories!

In addition, we’ve added some great note cards, for Chinese New Year or anytime you want to send a note to that special someone. These beautiful greeting cards are created by artists who mostly reside in Tianjin, China, about 60 miles east of Beijing on the Bohai Bay.  Most of the artists never received formal art training.  Their paintings reflect their daily lives, everyday events, festival, and traditional Chinese culture.

We hope you enjoy these new additions to our product offerings, and please continue to email us with your feedback. We know we can do even better with your input. Happy New Year!