Spring Festival in February? Chinese New Year? What is Chun Jie?

Spring festival, Chinese New Year, Lunar New Year; call it what you will, it is China’s most important holiday. What the Chinese call it (those who speak Mandarin, that is) is Chun Jie (春节 | Chūnjié) and it’s the time of year that millions, hundreds of millions, Chinese go home to see their families, visit relatives, exchange gifts, and start the new year off with a bang by setting off industrial grade fireworks.

There is some dispute over when people started celebrating Chun Jie but it was somewhere between two and three thousand years ago. Chun Jie – which literally translates as ‘spring festival’ – is a fifteen day period that starts off the lunar year with a bang. Ancient China was one of many cultures that kept time with the lunisolar calendar which tracks the time of the solar year as well as the phases of the moon. The upshot is that Chun Jie starts on a different day every year, sometime between January 21st and February 20th. As a result, no one in China is ever very clear on when it’s going to be until a month or two before is starts; something that frustrates foreigners trying to get a better deal on plane tickets home by booking them well in advance.

In 2010 Spring Festival starts on the 14th of February and lasts for 15 days. The first five are the most important, the time when people do the bulk of their visiting with family and friends, and after that the cities slowly come back to life.

Spring Festival is celebrated by spending time with one’s family and friends. Big meals with large numbers of family members are common and the smaller family units usually go together to call on other friends and relatives and receive guests at their own homes. As befits any proper holiday, there is a lot of eating, drinking, and chattering. Younger members of the family (those that have not yet graduated from college or reached that age) receive red envelopes called hong bao (红包 | hóng bāo) filled with cash from older relatives.

Though Chinese people don’t celebrate Chun Jie with large involved rituals, if you dig deeper into Spring Festival celebrations you’ll find that every action is imbued with symbolism. Much of it lies in the word play which is found in many Chinese customs. In northern China it is customary to start out the New Year by eating dumplings for breakfast because apparently the word for dumplings jiaozi (饺子 | jiǎozi) sounds like another Chinese word which means ‘bidding farewell to the old and ushering in the new’. It seems that the Chinese gold ingots of days past were molded like modern day jiaozi so there’s an added, wealth related, layer of auspiciousness.

Southern Chinese eat niangao (年糕 | niángāo) a very glutinous, very chewy cake made out of rice flour, because the homophone of niangao means "higher and higher, one year after another.” Also niangao feels like it will be with you, stuck in your teeth, for much of the coming year.