Spring Festival, also known as the Chinese New Year, is as important to Chinese people as Christmas to people in the West. The date of the Chinese new year is determined by the lunar calendar, so festivities begin with the new cycle of the moon that falls between January 21 and February 19 (the coming new year’s day: February 1). Each year is named for one of 12 symbolic animals in sequence. The animals, in their sequential order, are the rat, ox, tiger, hare, dragon, serpent, horse, ram, monkey, rooster, dog and boar.

             All family members will come back home for the festival. Houses are thoroughly cleaned and festooned with paper scrolls bearing auspicious antithetical couplet, debts repaid, hair cut and new clothes purchased. In many homes, people burn incense at home and in the temples to pay respects to ancestors and ask the gods for good health in the coming months.

             On New Year's Eve, families get together to send off the old year and usher in the new, a year which they hope will be rich in harvest, happiness and success. People go to bed much later than usual and even stay up over night. Some spend the night to watch the year go out, chatting or playing card games or mahjong, watching TV and nibbling sweets and nuts and all sorts of delicacies. People, especially children, set off firecrackers and fireworks (usually starting from 12:00 a.m. but now few minutes earlier) and you can hear them pop and bang throughout the night.

             During the first three days of the new year people pay visit (bai nian) to friends or relatives. Most people go back to work on the eighth day. In the countryside, however, festivities go on until the fifteenth day which is called Lantern Festival when people decorate their homes with colorful lanterns and treat themselves with Yuanxiao, a kind of glutinous rice flour balls stuffed with sweet fillings or meat or dried cassia flower. Throughout China, lanterns of every description are put on public display.