Happy Lunar New Year! For the year of 2021, Lunar New Year starts on February 12 and 2021 will be the Year of the Ox/Buffalo (depending on the country celebrating, there are slight variations in the zodiac animals).
Lunar New Year is a festival celebrated in several Asian countries including, but not limited to China, Taiwan, South Korea, Vietnam, and Mongolia. It’s called Lunar New Year because it marks the first new moon of the lunisolar calendar and often times is celebrated over the course of several days. In South Korea, Vietnam, and Mongolia, celebrations are typically 3 days, while in China, celebrations are roughly 15 days.
The festivities that we traditionally see in the United States are usually representative of the Chinese celebratory fashion. Overlapping themes in each country’s celebrations include cleaning households and clearing debts to start the year off right, visiting family, honoring ancestors, decorating with symbols of good fortune, and eating delicious food symbolic of good fortune and good health.
We wanted to throwback to our 2020 Lantern Making Event at both Lakeshore Campus and Water Tower Campus. Red lanterns are commonly used to decorate to celebrate Chinese New Year to scare away Nian, a monster from an ancient Chinese legend (read more here). For the Chinese Lunar New Year celebration, a lantern festival is held on the 15th day, marking the end of the Lunar New Year and the first full moon in the Chinese calendar.
Although we are not able to host the event again this year, you can download the instructions for making the lanterns on your own.
You can learn more about Lunar New Year through the library’s resources. Here are a few curated options to get you started:
General information on Lunar New Year (from Britannica Academia, formerly called Encyclopedia Britannica): https://academic.eb.com/levels/collegiate/article/Lunar-New-Year/438707
Learn about Chun Jie/Spring Festival/Chinese Lunar New Year (from World Religions Online): http://flagship.luc.edu/login?url=https://online.infobase.com/Auth/Index?aid=104544&itemid=WE30&articleId=247948
Learn about Têt Nguyên Dán/Vietnamese Lunar New Year (an excerpt from Asian Americans: An Encyclopedia of Social, Cultural, Economic, and Political History): https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX6142600531/GVRL?u=loyolau&sid=GVRL&xid=6c611527
Check out Andrea Ngyugen’s story in the New York Times on family celebrations of Têt and Têt food recipes: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/29/dining/tet-vietnamese-recipes-lunar-new-year.html
Learn about Seollal/Korean Lunar New Year (an excerpt from Encyclopedia of Modern Asian): https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/CX3403702729/GVRL?u=loyolau&sid=GVRL&xid=87842ed5
Learn about Tsagaan Sar/Mongolian Lunar New Year (from the Selena Travel Group in Ulaanbaatar, Monogolia): https://www.selenatravel.com/mongolia-lunar-new-year
Even if you do not traditionally celebrate Lunar New Year, one thing you can do to celebrate is support local Asian-Pacific Islander-owned businesses, particularly Asian-Pacific Islander-owned restaurants. Among the many disruptions COVID-19 brought into our lives, it has also brought a lot of anti-Asian racism and xenophobia in the form of discrimination, racial slurs, and violence, which continues to this day. Pandemic life is hard enough without having to deal with bigotry.
Show your support by ordering takeout or delivery from Argyle, Devon, Chinatown, or your favorite local Asian-Pacific Islander-owned restaurant!
Let’s come together in a socially-distanced format because Lunar New Year is all about spreading joy and celebrating with your family and community! Happy New Year!
