CNY Lead Up

After the new year began, we started to see things around town getting ready for the Chinese New Year (CNY): the year of the snake.  Even buses were decked out.

The mall close to our house had a deer thing going on…still not really sure why deer, but the plum blossoms are beautiful!

  

We stopped by the bookstore for a birthday gift, and happened upon a couple CNY children’s books.  We bought two and I absolutely love them!  They go through the traditions of Chinese New Year in a simple and cute way; I wish I would have had them from the very first year we moved here! 

 

 

 

 

 

The bakery in the mall is always good for a quick snack, but this time they had CNY snake buns.  Couldn’t pass up these cuties. 

 

Pretty much every building has some sort of CNY décor, including ours. 

 

During our visit to The Peninsula, we enjoyed viewing their CNY plum blossom tree. 

  

It is tradition to go to the market and buy the kids a new Chinese outfit, and that’s not just a tradition for us—that’s what the Chinese do too! 

 

Well, Ridge didn’t actually get a new one; the one from last year fit him perfectly this year.  Yah, it may have been slightly too big last year.

The kids get to wear their Chinese clothes to church and school.    

Another tradition is to give out hong baos (red envelopes) with money in them, but candy for children is also okay.  I whipped up a quick card in photo shop (not tradition), had Jade sign them (good handwriting practice), and included them with some chocolate coins to give out to all her classmates and mail to her cousins. 

  

When we hit up the market for hong baos, we also went on the search for some snakes to add to the rest of our CNY decorations.  It wasn’t long before we found all the snakes were cutesy-cartoony looking snakes.  Are you kidding me?  We want something cool and fierce.  It’s a snake after all!  It was not to be.  After looking in every store, we bought the best (least cutesy) ones we could find.  Hey, at least ours don’t have eyelashes like the rest of them did!! 

 

I came across one shop owner that spoke English, so I asked him why there were no fierce snakes, only cutesy ones.  He told me the Chinese don’t typically like the snake, so they make them cute so people will buy them.  A friend of ours explained it this way: “Being born in the year of the snake is like being put in the Slytherin House.”

The kids had fun putting up decorations and playing with our lion and dragon puppets.

  

We opted out of going to the Night Parade this year as it was held on Sunday.  Cody and I lucked out though and we got to see a quick drive by preview the day before when we were at High Tea.  When we were walking over to the TST waterfront to check out our fireworks spot for Monday, several of the parade floats drove passed for their run-through!  It was a great way to view the parade: quickly and without the crowd!

 

 

The TST promenade was also decked out with a lantern display. 

 

A traditional CNY food is dumplings.  Surprise, surprise. I thought about making them for our dinner, but eventually opted out because they are time consuming and are so cheap to simply buy from a restaurant (which we did later on in the week).  Instead I decided to make an unauthentic—but still delicious—American Chinese dinner of Shannon’s yummy Orange Chicken.    

Then rather than serving not-so-delicious congee, I provided the family with a big stack of beignets for breakfast.  Had no complaints with that one!  Now we were fed and energized for our day waiting for the fireworks…