Chinese New Year

Chinese New Year: Spring Festival, the new year of Chinese traditional calendar, is one of major traditional national holidays in China. In ancient times, people called the Spring Festival as New Year. The reason for why ancients arranged the beginning of the year in cold days was that people had few work to do instead of harvesting in autumn, collecting in winter and plowing in spring, weeding in summer. Farmers made full use of such a slack season to celebrate joyfully.

In order to rejoice at the New Year, people wished others a happy new year and blessed heartily. Some stick calligraphies full of joy on doors, most of them were antithetical couplet, phrase, individual character, such as: blessing, longevity, luckiness, propitious New Year and so on. Whereas, some people pasted paper-cuts for window decorations to do away with the old and set up the new, the patterns of paper-cuts mainly consisted of figure, flower, character, any of the twelve animals representing the twelve Earthly Branches, and other animals.

It was in recent times that people called the New Year as the Spring Festival. Although China had conducted legislative reform for several times, Chinese traditional calendar was still applied, only after the Revolution of 1911, the Gregorian calendar had begun to be applied. For distinguishing two new years in Gregorian calendar and Chinese traditional calendar, additionally, the new year in Chinese traditional calendar is around the Beginning of Spring, so people termed the new year in Chinese traditional calendar as the Spring Festival.

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